I haven't gotten around to reading this yet, but I very much want to.

This assumption that we are at the beginning of a political project, rather than at the bleak terminus of history, seems crucial today in order to avoid endemic social depression and lowering of expectations in the face of global cultural homogenization, climate change and ongoing financial crisis. Confronting such developments, and the indifference of markets to their human consequences, even the keenest liberals are hard- pressed to argue that capitalism remains the vehicle and sine qua non of modernity and progress; and yet the political response to this situation often seems to face backwards rather than forwards.

Despair seems to be the dominant sentiment of the contemporary Left, whose crisis perversely mimics its foe, consoling itself either with the minor pleasures of shrill denunciation, mediatised protest and ludic disruptions, or with the scarcely credible notion that maintaining a grim 'critical' vigilance on the total subsumption of human life under capital, from the safehouse of theory, or from within contemporary art's self- congratulatory fog of 'indeterminacy', constitutes resistance. Hegemonic neoliberalism claims there is no alternative, and established Left political thinking, careful to desist from Enlightenment 'grand narratives', wary of any truck with a technological infrastructure tainted by capital, and allergic to an entire civilizational heritage that it lumps together and discards as 'instrumental thinking', patently fails to offer the alternative it insists must be possible, except in the form of counterfactual histories and all- too- local interventions into a decentred, globally- integrated system that is at best indifferent to them. The general reasoning is that if modernity = progress = capitalism = acceleration, then the only possible resistance amounts to deceleration, whether through a fantasy of collective organic self- sufficiency or a solo retreat into miserablism and sagacious warnings against the treacherous counterfinalities of rational thought.

Needless to say, a well- to- do liberal Left, convinced that technology equates to instrumental mastery and that capitalist economics amounts to a heap of numbers, in most cases leaves concrete technological nous and economic arguments to its adversary—something it shares with its more radical but equally technologically illiterate academic counterparts, who confront capitalism with theoretical constructs so completely at odds with its concrete workings that the most they can offer is a faith in miraculous events to come, scarcely more effectual than organic folk politics. In some quarters, a Heideggerian Gelassenheit or 'letting be' is called for, suggesting that the best we can hope for is to desist entirely from destructive development and attempts to subdue or control nature—an option that, needless to say, is also the prerogative of an individualised privileged spectator who is the subjective product of global capital.

I thought I’d throw together a reading list of easily accessible and recent online resources — with commentary — for people who want to see for themselves just how much writing there is that counters (or straight up ignores) the persistent “gotta go fast” argument of a lot of recent interlocutors.

[…]

I want to share and discuss some relatively recent online essays that I’d recommend starting with if you want to — in the apparent spirit of things — get up to date fast. […] My intention with it is to show how each of the different posts, essays and articles selected here paint a very different picture of accelerationism than the one a lot of people think they know. Reading them on their own will do this in itself, I hope, but just to be on the safe side, I’m leaving no point unconnected from the one which precedes it. This level of caution feels necessary because, I must admit, I’ve been astounded this week by how poor an understanding of accelerationism so many people have, including people who actively identity themselves as some sort of “accelerationist”! But this, too, is no new trend…

I legitimately have never felt as stimulated by a philosophy before as I have by accelerationism. Not the stupid charicature of it which — somehow — is also occasionally adopted by many who call themselves such; nor the right wing occult worship of a dark future that the later Nick Land represented; but a program which is better, faster, stronger, and more dangerous than what most leftists can hope to offer; far more adapted for the times we — still, even though these ideas were originally hatching slimy and new from their egg twenty or thirty years ago — find ourselves in.

"Why political intellectuals, do you incline towards the proletariat? In commiseration for what? […] you dare not say that the only important thing there is to say, that one can enjoy swallowing the shit of capital, its materials, its metal bars, its polystyrene, its books, its sausage pâtés, swallowing tonnes of it till you burst – and because instead of saying this, which is also what happens in the desires of those who work with their hands, arses and heads, ah, you become a leader of men, what a leader of pimps, you lean forward and divulge: ah, but that’s alienation, it isn’t pretty, hang on, we’ll save you from it, we will work to liberate you from this wicked affection for servitude, we will give you dignity. And in this way you situate yourselves on the most despicable side, the moralistic side where you desire that our capitalized’s desire be totally ignored, brought to a standstill, you are like priests with sinners, our servile intensities frighten you, you have to tell yourselves: how they must suffer to endure that! And of course we suffer, we the capitalized, but this does not mean that we do not enjoy, nor that what you think you can offer us as a remedy – for what? – does not disgust us, even more. We abhor therapeutics and its vaseline, we prefer to burst under the quantitative excesses that you judge the most stupid. And don’t wait for our spontaneity to rise up in revolt either." (LE 116)

[…]

From Anti-Oedipus:

"But which is the revolutionary path? Is there one? – To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World Countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist 'economic solution'? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go further still, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to 'accelerate the process,' as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet. (239-40)"

And from Libidinal Economy – the one passage from the text that is remembered, if only in notoriety:

"The English unemployed did not have to become workers to survive, they – hang on tight and spit on me – enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them, enjoyed the dissolutions of their families and villages, and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in morning and evening." (LE 111)

Spit on Lyotard they certainly did. But in what does the alleged scandalous nature of this passage reside? Hands up who wants to give up their anonymous suburbs and pubs and return to the organic mud of the peasantry. […] Hands up, furthermore, those who really believe that these desires for a restored organic wholeness are extrinsic to late capitalist culture, rather than in fully incorporated components of the capitalist libidinal infrastructure. Hollywood itself tells us that we may appear to be always-on techno-addicts, hooked on cyberspace, but inside, in our true selves, we are primitives organically linked to the mother/planet, and victimised by the military-industrial complex. James Cameron’s Avatar is significant because it highlights the disavowal that is constitutive of late capitalist subjectivity, even as it shows how this disavowal is undercut. We can only play at being inner primitives by virtue of the very cinematic proto-VR technology whose very existence presupposes the destruction of the organic idyll of Pandora.

And if there is no desire to go back except as a cheap Hollywood holiday in other People’s misery – if, as Lyotard argues, there are no primitive societies, (yes, the Terminator was there from the start, distributing microchips to accelerate its advent); isn’t, then, the only direction forward? Through the shit of capital, metal bars, its polystyrene, its books, its sausage pâtés, its cyberspace matrix?

I want to make three claims here –

1. Everyone is an accelerationist
2. Accelerationism has never happened.
3. Marxism is nothing if it is not accelerationist

[…]

Land is the kind of antagonist that the left needs. If Land’s cyber-futurism can seem out of date, it is only in the same sense that jungle and techno are out of date – not because they have been superseded by new futurisms, but because the future as such has succumbed to retrospection. The actual near future wasn’t about Capital stripping off its latex mask and revealing the machinic death’s head beneath; it was just the opposite: New Sincerity, Apple Computers advertised by kitschy-cutesy pop. This failure to foresee the extent to which pastiche, recapitulation and a hyper-oedipalised neurotic individualism would become the dominant cultural tendencies is not a contingent error; it points to a fundamental misjudgement about the dynamics of capitalism. But this does not legitimate a return to the quill pens and powdered wigs of the eighteenth century bourgeois revolution, or to the endlessly restaged logics of failure of May ‘68, neither of which have any purchase on the political and libidinal terrain in which we are currently embedded.

[…]

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. […]

For precisely these reasons, accelerationism can function as an anti-capitalist strategy […] What we are not talking about here is the kind of intensification of exploitation that a kneejerk socialist humanism might imagine when the spectre of accelerationism is invoked. As Lyotard suggests, the left subsiding into a moral critique of capitalism is a hopeless betrayal of the anti-identitarian futurism that Marxism must stand for if it is to mean anything at all.

[…]

Capitalism has abandoned the future because it can’t deliver it. Nevertheless, the contemporary left’s tendencies towards Canutism, its rhetoric of resistance and obstruction, collude with capital’s anti/meta-narrative that it is the only story left standing. Time to leave behind the logics of failed revolts, and to think ahead again.

Rejecting the anti-desire transcendental miserablism of leftist politics, and the resultant complete identification of capitalism with the satisfaction of desire:

If opposition to capital does not require that one maintains an anti- technological, anti- mass production stance, why - in the minds of some of its supporters, as much as in the caricatures produced by opponents such as Mensch - has anti- capitalism become exclusively identified with this organicism. Here we are a long way from Lenin's enthusiasm for Taylorism, or Gramsci’s celebration of Fordism, or indeed from the Soviet embrace of technology in the space race. Capital has long tried to claim a monopoly on desire: we only have to remember famous 1980s advert for Levi jeans in which a teenager was seen anxiously snuggling a pair of jeans through a Soviet border post. But the emergence of consumer electronic goods has allowed capital to conflate desire and technology so that the desire for an iPhone can now appear automatically to mean a desire for capitalism.

[…]

Land’s theory-fictional provocations were guided by the assumption that desire and communism were fundamentally incompatible […] they luridly expose the scale and the nature of the problems that the left now faces. Land […] highlight[s] the extent to which [capitalism's present] victory was dependent upon the libidinal mechanics of the advertising and PR companies whose semiotic excrescences despoil former public spaces. […] A pervasive negative advertising delibidinizes all things public, traditional, pious, charitable, authoritative, or serious, taunting them with the slew seductiveness of the commodity. Land is merely right about this “servative negative advertising” but the question is how to combat it. Instead of the anti- capitalist “no logo” call for a retreat from semiotic productivity, why not an embrace of all the mechanisms of semiotic- libidinal production in the name of a post- capitalist counterbranding? “Radical chic” is not something that the left should flee from - very much to the contrary, it is something that it must embrace and cultivate.

[…]

The second reason Land’s texts are important is that they expose an uncomfortable contradiction between the radical left’s official commitment to revolution, and its actual tendency towards political and formal- aesthetic conservatism. In Land’s writings, a quasi- hydraulic force of desire is set against a leftist- Canutist impulse towards preserving, protecting and defending. […] Where is the left that can speak as confidently in the name of an alien future, that can openly celebrate, rather than museum, the disintegration of existing socialities and territorialities?

The third reason Land’s texts are worth reckoning with is because they assume a terrain that politics now operates on, or must operate on, if it is to be effective - a terrain in which technology is embedded into everyday life and the body; design and PR are ubiquitous; financial abstraction enjoys domination over government; life and culture are subsumed into cyber- space, and data- tracking consequently assumes an increasingly important role. […] In the wake of the decline of the traditional workers’ movement, we have too often been forced into a false choice between an ascetic- authoritarian Leninism that at least worked in the sense that it took control of the state and limited the dominion of capital and models of political self- organisation which have done little to challenge neoliberal hegemony. What we need to construct is what was promised but never actually delivered by the various “anti- revolutions” of the 1960s: an effective anti- authoritarian left.

[…]

Post- Fordism has seen the decomposition of the old working class - which, in the Global North at least, is no longer concentrated in manufacturing spaces, and whose forms of industrial action are consequently no longer as effective as they once were. At the same time, the libidinal attractions of consumer capitalism needed to be met with a counterfolding, not simply an anti- libidinal dampening.

This entails that politics comes to terms with the essentially inorganic nature of libido […] that which Lacan and Land call the death drive: not a desire for death, for the extinction of desire in what Freud called the Nirvana principle, but an active force of death, defined by the tendency to deviate from any homeostatic regulation […] we ourselves are that which disrupts organic equilibrium. […] history has a direction […] [and] one implication of this is that it is very difficult to put this historically- machined inorganic libido back in its box: if desire is a historical- machinic force, its emergence alters “reality” itself; to suppress it would therefore involve either a massive reversal of history, or collective amnesia on a grand scale, or both.

[…] we can now see that the challenge is to imagine a postcapitalism that is commensurate with the death drive. At the moment, too much anticapitalism seems to be about the impossible pursuit of a social system oriented towards the Nirvana principle - to a quiescence - precisely the return to a mythical primitiveist equilibrium which the likes of Mensch mock. But any such return to primitivism would require either an apocalypse or the imposition of authoritarian measures - how else is drive to be banished? A leap into it is not a milligram; it not what we want, then we crucially need to articulate what it is we do want - which will mean disarticulating technology and desire from capital.

An example of how a postcapitalism that accepts and satisfies desire, instead of rejecting it and tamping down on it, need not be the same as consumerist capitalism — how capitalism, despite being identified with the satisfaction of desire, is actually imperfect at it, contra Land:

[…] Now, it begins to look as if, far from there being some inevitable fit between the desire for Starbucks and capitalism, Starbucks feeds desires which it can meet only in some provisional and unsatisfactory way. What is, in others, the desire for Starbucks is the thwarted desire for communism? For what is the “third place” that Starbucks offers - this place that is neither home nor work - if not a degraded prefiguration of communism itself?

A succinct statement of what clearer-eyed less capitalism-worshipping accelerationism actually means:

For Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism is defined by the way it simultaneously engenders and inhibits processes of destratification. In their famous formulation, capitalism deterritorializes and reterritorializes at the same time; there is no process of abstract decoding without a reciprocal decoding via neurotic personalisation (Oedipalisation) - hence the early 21st century disjunction of massively abstract finance capital on one hand; oedipalised celebrity culture on the other. Capitalism is a necessarily failed escape from feudalism, which, instead of destroying encastment, reconstructs social stratification in the class structure. It is only given this model that Deleuze and Guattari’s call to “accelerate the process” makes sense. It does not mean accelerating any or everything in capitalism willy- nilly in the hope that capitalism will thereby collapse. Rather, it means accelerating the processes of destratification that capitalism cannot but obstruct. One virtue of this model is that it places capital, not its adversary, on the side of resistance and control…

For Srnicek and Williams and other managerialists, the worsening is cut out of the picture: things will get better if only we establish a practical political hegemony that can make it so. This, apparently, is the real content of accelerationism […] In this response, of course, the humanist obsession reaches a totalising climax: the human capacity to reshape the world is utterly unbound; the promised land lies not beyond but immediately ahead.

The unconditional accelerationist dismisses the question. […] It is precisely against this view that accelerationism defines itself as ‘antihuman(ist)’, and against the fundamental question of praxis that it offers ‘antipraxis’. This can hardly mean ‘Do nothing’, of course: that would mean not just to return to the fundamental question of praxis, but to offer perhaps the most numbly tedious answer of all. The unconditional accelerationist, instead, referring to the colossal horrors presented to the human agent […] points to the basic unimportance of unidirectional human agency. We ‘hurl defiance to the stars’, but in their silence—when we see them at all—the stars return only crushing contempt. To the question ‘What is to be done?’, then, she can legitimately answer only, ‘Do what thou wilt’—and ‘Let go.’

We insist, then, that there is no promised land […] Far from discouraging the unconditional accelerationist or beckoning her to the grim convent of asceticism, however, the ruins in which this realisation contemptuously leaves us are the terrain of a genuine, even, properly, horrific aesthetic freedom that is liberated from the totality of a one-directional political teleology […] Taking the smallest steps beyond good and evil, the unconditional accelerationist, more than anyone else, is free at heart to pursue what she thinks is good and right and interesting—but with the ironical realisation that the primary ends that are served are not her own. For the unconditional accelerationist, the fastidious seriousness of the problem-solvers who propose to ‘save humanity’ is absurd in the face of the problems they confront. It can provoke only Olympian laughter. […]

This freedom is what antipraxis means […]

One of the major points of contention concerning unconditional accelerationism […] can be summed up with the single phrase “U/ACC lacks praxis”. In the common leftist deployment of the phrase, this is exactly correct. […] U/ACC is hardly anti-praxis; it simply asks that the limits and the inevitable dissolution of things be acknowledged […] perhaps it is best to view U/ACC not as anti-praxis, but as anti-collective means of intervention.

[…] U/ACC calls attention to the manner through which collective forms of intervention and political stabilization, be they of the left or the the right, are rendered impossible in the long-run through overarching tendencies and forces. […] U/ACC charts a course outwards: the structures of Oedipus, the Cathedral, Leviathan, what have you, will be ripped apart and decimated by forces rushing up from within and around the system […]

Consider the classic Marxian formula: M – C – M’. This is, of course, a simple pathway of capital, beginning with money (M), which is translated into the commodity (C) to be sold on the market. If successful sold, the commodity is translated into a greater amount of money than at the beginning (M’) – and it is at this point that the process restarts. M – C – M’ – C…. on and on and on. […] This, in turn, clues us into the abstract force, glimpsed through diagrammation, which can lurks behind modernity rendered as historical totality: positive feedback. […] The processual relations of capital appear here as far from any sort of homeostasis.

Positive feedback not only marks the evolution of a given system, or a generalized forward direction. It is also indicative of […] past forms being undermined and propelled towards catastrophe. While for many the catastrophe might appear as something like communism, Marx as early as the Communist Manifesto was enraptured by the image of capitalist modernity as unfolding through creative destruction.

[…]

The positive-feedback processes […] radiates out across the entirety of social, cultural, political, even ecology strata […] All these [market, commercial, technological, etc.] forces lock into momentum with one another and act as force multipliers, each looping through the other, pushing it forward, faster, moving the entirety of the system towards… something – and it is this something that control systems, of either the left or the right, would be forced (and will always fail) to contend with.

[…]

Through the passage of time, the prevailing organizational dynamics have shifted […] With each passing iteration, the status of the hierarchical formation itself declines as the relations tend towards the network, or even post-network, formations. This is precisely because, Bar-Yam notes, of a rise in the ‘complexity profile’ being shaped within civilization. As the nonlinear processes driven by cascading positive feedback intensify and rise, organization itself becomes more complex, more heterogeneous, more multiplicitious, and less congenial to control systems. Rising complexity, in the end, trashes the orderly nature of organic wholeness.

The L/ACC critic might stop here and decry the construction of a strawman. “Of course we aren’t for firm hierarchy,” they are probably saying. “We’re interested in flexible forms, in hybridity and multiplicity.” […] “we support decentralized planning”. Allow me to respond to these oppositions quickly: flexible control, modular hierarchy, and decentralized planning all fall victim to the same forward rush of rising complexity as their more formalized and concrete kin.

Control systems always rely on a high degree of legibility […] in order to properly enable generalized management and specific intervention […] – yet this becomes its very Achilles’ heel. Consider Andrew Pickering’s description of the conclusions gleamed by the cybernetician Ross Ashby’s research into homeostats: “The only route to stabilisation is to cut down variety – to reduce the number of configurations an assemblage can take on, by reducing the number of participants and the multiplicity of their interconnections.” […] Pickering at length:

"Ashby was interested in the length of time it would take combinations of homeostats to achieve collective equilibrium. […] Both calculations and his machines showed that four fully interconnected homeostats, each capable of taking on twenty-five different inner states, could come into equilibrium in a couple of seconds. But if one extrapolated that an assemblage of one hundred fully interconnected homeostats the combinatories were such that chance on an equilibrium arrangement would entail search-times orders of magnitudes greater than the age of the universe. […]

[…] Finding stability can easily become a practical impossibility."

To properly operate in the real […] L/ACC or R/ACC praxis would be contingent upon the expunging of variables upon variables to push the complexity profile downwards, to make it more manageable (which is something that R/ACC tends to admit more than L/ACC). But to do this would not only mean restricting flows of people, goods, and money […] It would also require roadblocks thrown up in the path of technological development, and the suppressing of the capability of making and using tools to operate in the world. The promotion of a collective cognitive project would, ironically, be forced to suppress cognitive activity on the molecular scale.

In the end this scenario does not seem very likely. Multitudes of positive feedback processes have long since become deeply entrenched, and the system as a whole is undeniably veering far from order. […] The complexity profile is rising and will continue, and as it does the capability for collective intervention will become all but impossible. […]

Contra any gamble for collectively scalable politics of bootstrapping and navigation, Bar-Yam suggests that in the face of mounting complexity, organizational design is forced to tend towards “progressively smaller branching ratios (fewer individuals supervised by a single individual)”. As mutational development speeds up and legibility fades, size becomes a liability. James Scott has shown that detachment of large managerial forces from the chaotic ‘on-the-ground’ environs is a recipe for disaster. Similarly, Kevin Carson has illustrated the way that the Hayekian knowledge problem […] not only applies to state-centric command economies, but to the organizational black box of the modern corporation. As such problems intensify, any possibility for navigation falls downward, to smaller and more dynamic firms, greater marketization (technocommercialism begetting technocommercialism), and ultimately individual actors themselves.

It is at this point where one might happen on something that looks like U/ACC praxis. If one’s goal is the dissolution of the state and/or rule by multinational monopoly capitalism, then why recourse to the very systems and mechanisms that seek to stabilize these forms and shore them up against the forces that undermine them? This question is at the core of Deleuze and Guattari’s insight in the ‘accelerationist fragment’ that to “withdraw from the world market”, as opposed to going deeper into the throes of it, is a “curious revival of the fascist ‘economic solution’”. […]

To accelerate the process, and to throw oneself into those flows, leaves behind the (already impossible) specter of collective intervention. This grander anti-praxis opens, in turn, the space for examining forms of praxis that break from the baggage of the past. We could count agorism and exit as forms impeccable to furthering the process, and cypherpoliticsxi and related configurations arise on the far end of the development, as the arc bends towards molecularization of economic and social relations. […]

No more reterritorializing reactions. No more retroprogressivism.

"They Killed Their Mother": Avatar as Ideological Symptom :accelerationism:culture:philosophy:anarchism:

:ID: 95D1B84E-C6AA-4466-9987-48B3F01F2728

Watching Avatar, I was continually reminded of Zizek's observation in First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, that the one good thing that capitalism did was destroy Mother Earth. […] What is foreclosed in the opposition between a predatory technologised capitalism and a primitive organicism, evidently, is the possibility of a modern, technologised anti-capitalism. It is in presenting this pseudo-opposition that Avatar functions as an ideological symptom. […] Sully, the marine who is "really" a tree-hugging primitive, is a paradigm of that late capitalist subjectivity which disavows its modernity. There's something wonderfully ironic about the fact that Sully's - and our - identification with the Na'vi depends upon the very advanced technology that the Na'vi's way of life makes impossible. […] If we are to escape from the impasses of capitalist realism, if we are to come up with an authentic and genuinely sustainable model of green politics (where the sustainability is a matter of libido, not only of natural resources), we have to overcome these disavowals. There is no way back from the matricide which was the precondition for the emergence of modern subjectivity. To quote one of my favourite passages in First As Tragedy: "Fidelity to the communist Idea means that, to repeat, Arthur Rimbaud, … we should remain absolutely modern and reject the all too glib generalization whereby the critique of capitalism morphs into the critique of 'modern instrumental reason' or 'modern technological civilization'." The issue is, rather, how modern technological civilization can be organised in a different way.

This is a… deeply flawed essay, obviously, given who wrote it. The core point I disagree with is, of course, the indentification of capitalism purely with its creatively destructive, competitive, market elements, a mistake which Mark Fisher accurately identifies in "Postcapitalist Desire" as being at the very core of where Land goes off the deep end. Nevertheless, Land's screed accurately points to a fundamental problem wit the attitude of the modern left.

This post at K-Punk epitomizes a gathering trend among neomarxists to finally bury all aspiration to positive economism (‘freeing the forces of production from capitalist relations of production’) and install a limitless cosmic despair in its place. Who still remembers Khruschev’s threat to the semi-capitalist West – “we’ll bury you.” Or Mao’s promise that the Great Leap Forward would ensure the Chinese economy leapt past that of the UK within 15 years? The Frankfurtian spirit now rules: Admit that capitalism will outperform its competitors under almost any imaginable circumstances, while turning that very admission into a new kind of curse (“we never wanted growth anyway, it just spells alienation, besides, haven’t you heard that the polar bears are drowning …?”).

[…]

The grand master of this move is Arthur Schopenhauer, who lent it explicit philosophical rigour as a mode of transcendental apprehension. Since time is the source of our distress –- PKD’s “Black Iron Prison” – how can any kind of evolution be expected to save us? Thus Transcendental Miserablism constitutes itself as an impregnable mode of negation […] all that survives of Marx is a psychological bundle of resentments and disgruntlements

[…]

For the Transcendental Miserablist, ‘Capitalism’ is the suffering of desire turned to ruin, the name for everything that might be wanted in time, an intolerable tantalization whose ultimate nature is unmasked by the Gnostic visionary as loss, decrepitude and death, and in truth, it is not unreasonable that capitalism should become the object of this resentful denigration. Without attachment to anything beyond its own abysmal exuberance, capitalism identifies itself with desire to a degree that cannot imaginably be exceeded, shamelessly soliciting any impulse that might contribute an increment of economizable drive to its continuously multiplying productive initiatives. Whatever you want, capitalism is the most reliable way to get it, and by absorbing every source of social dynamism, capitalism makes growth, change and even time itself into integral components of its endlessly gathering tide.

“Go for growth” now means “Go (hard) for capitalism.” It is increasingly hard to remember that this equation would once have seemed controversial. On the left it would once have been dismissed as risible. This is the new world Transcendental Miserablism haunts as a dyspeptic ghost.

[…]

Hence the Transcendental Miserablist syllogism: Time is on the side of capitalism, capitalism is everything that makes me sad, so time must be evil.

The polar bears are drowning, and there’s nothing at all we can do about it.

What Transcendental Miserablism has no right to is the pretence of a positive thesis. The Marxist dream of dynamism without competition was merely a dream, an old monotheistic dream re-stated, the wolf lying down with the lamb. If such a dream counts as ‘imagination’, then imagination is no more than a defect of the species: the packaging of tawdry contradictions as utopian fantasies, to be turned against reality in the service of sterile negativity. ‘Post-capitalism’ has no real meaning except an end to the engine of change. […] And if that makes Transcendental Miserablists unhappy, the simple truth of the matter is: Anything would.

Considering capital as the ultimate “eerie entity”, Fisher wonders about the ways

"that “we” “ourselves” are caught up in the rhythms, pulsions and patternings of non-human forces. There is no inside except as a folding of the outside; the mirror cracks, I am an other, and I always was.[note]Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater Books, 2016), 11-12.[/note]"

Following this, it is fitting that Fisher then begins his book with an exploration of the works of H.P. Lovecraft. He notes that “it is not horror but fascination — albeit a fascination usually mixed with a certain trepidation — that is integral to Lovecraft’s rendition of the weird”.[note]Ibid., 17.[/note] For Fisher, on both an aesthetic and political level, it is the weird that is desirable for its ability to “de-naturalise all worlds, by exposing their instability, their openness to the outside”.[note]Ibid., 29.[/note]

[…]

The Outside is a concept that has long haunted the history of philosophy under various different names and formulations — from the Kantian noumenon to the Lacanian Real, et al. — with each functioning as a challenge to subjectivity that attempts to think beyond phenomenal limit-experiences. Whilst this broad definition is applicable to the narratives in much weird fiction, these tales explore the Outside through narrated ‘experience’ rather than objective academic analysis and they do so with an imaginative flare that has fascinated many.

[…]

The [Cthulhu] cult represent the Outside as a comprehensible and material social threat, far more visibly dangerous than the misadventures of the atomised individual in their collective channelling of the powers of the great Cthulhu. Whatever horrifying and unthinkable form the Outside may take, the fact remains that it is seemingly through community alone that its affects can be harnessed (whilst nonetheless remaining intolerable to the individual human mind).

[…]

Death is, of course, the ultimate limit-experience, the ultimate challenge to subjectivity, and here grief becomes the affective result of being haunted by the Outside through the absences that death imposes upon both individual and community.

[…]

Caring for one another with the intensity that so often follows grief renews the possibility of such a collective subject being established […] it is through community that the affects of the Outside are channelled, whilst still remaining intolerable, and the political implications of this communal channelling are considerable.

Whilst such implications are not discussed in The Weird and the Eerie explicitly, in the context of Fisher’s wider writings the book reads like an aesthetic toolkit for ontopolitical ‘egress’[…] In his next book, Acid Communism, left in an unknown state of completion at the time of his death, Fisher was to address the political reality of egress more explicitly. He hoped to reinvigorate the psychedelic praxes of consciousness-raising/-razing that have come to culturally define the 1960s and ’70s, channelling them through his postcapitalist desires.

[…]

In the unpublished introduction to Acid Communism, Fisher writes of this potential return of the new that capitalist realism […] repeatedly ungrounds […]. Fisher seemed to want to encourage a community of Lovecraftian Outsiders, unsure of how they arrived at their present situation but nonetheless curious to leave the cloistered world in which they find themselves.

[…]

For Fisher, thinking through the work of Herbert Marcuse, the history of Western art is littered with exit strategies. He presents a leftist instantiation of Land’s Outsider position, challenging the contemporary populist left, that can at best be described as working to a model of all voice and no exit, calling for new attempts at finding exits through other ways of living — attempts that have all too often been neutered by capitalism’s cooptive mechanisms.

[…]

However, Fisher’s is not an anarcho-primitivist position, supporting a return to a time before capitalism and its technologies. His accelerationist position is an advocation of the use of capitalism’s forces to modulate past potentials, transducing them into the future by collectively harnessing capital’s deterritorializing capacities for outside aims and egresses.

U/ACC instead argues that what is open to ‘us’ is perhaps only the possibility of, as Deleuze writes in Logic of Sense, a “becoming the quasi-cause of what is produced within us”. There remains much which is inherently outside ‘us’, however. All we are able to do is produce “surfaces and linings in which the event is reflected”. [2]

In accelerating the process, Deleuze and Guattari nod purposefully towards Nietzsche, and, in light of the limits of what we are able to produce, we should remember that what is key for Deleuze in Nietzsche’s thought is his amor fati; his love of fate. Fate for Nietzsche is not our theistic destiny in the hands of God but the affirmation of a life caught up in its own flows. It is in this way that Deleuze writes of becoming worthy of the Event, of a life made impersonal.

[…]

In living a life (as opposed to my life — privileging the immanently impersonal over the segregated and territorialising personal), the task is “to become worthy of what happens to us, and thus to will and release the event, to become the offspring of one’s own events, and thereby be reborn, to have one more birth, and to break with one’s carnal birth — to become the offspring of one’s events and not of one’s actions, for the action is itself produced by the offspring of the event.” [5]

The extended quote of Libidinal Economy found in Mark Fisher's essay, Postcapitalist Desire is fascinating — one might say, arousing? — and it really made me want to read this book. This is my best-attempt OCR of a PDF of it I found on the internet archive, using a custom complex AI orchestration pipeline (that uses fuzzy diffing to avoid hallucinations).

While of course I may and will probably (a) not understand a lot of what I read herein, given Land's dense and occultish style and (b) disagree with — at the very least, the evaluative stances — some of what I find, nevertheless I find Land (before his neoreactionary turn) a fascinating, fascinating intellectual figure, much in the way I do Hobbes or de Sade or Nietzsche (although I unironically agree with Nietzsche a lot more, I think). As Mark Fisher says, Land is the philosopher the left needs to challenge its thinking, its ideas, and its methods — and even its values. Fanged Noumena is a collection of his early CCRU era writings, precisely those prior to his neoreactionary turn, so this is the most interesting stuff for me to read, since I find his neoreactionary ideas painfully boring compared to his left-accelerationist ones.

A clip from one of Mark Fisher’s mid-2010s lectures has been hooked back into social-media networks, bringing him more posthumous virality.

An account called ‘dailyconceptmedia’ has shared a clip of Mark talking about smartphones in which he explicitly makes a few distinctions — for instance, between cyberspace (in general) and capitalist cyberspace — that have nonetheless gone ignored in every comments section, as people fall back on the limited picture they have of Mark’s work. Indeed, despite the content of what he says, most discussion of the clip has taken dailyconceptmedia’s contextualisation at face value:

"More than a decade ago, cyberculture theorist Mark Fisher warned: digital culture was causing “the slow cancellation of the future.”"

…

Although his critiques of digital culture under late capitalism are damning, he does not give in the reflexive impotence of a capitalist-realist perspective here either. He writes:

"One trap laid by communicative capitalism is the temptation to retreat from technological modernity. But this presupposes that frenzied attentional bombardment is the only possible technological modernity, from which we can only unplug and withdraw. Communicative capitalist realism acts as if the collectivisation of desire and resources had already happened. In actuality, the imperatives of communicative capitalism obstruct the possibility of communization, by using actually existing cyberspace to reinforce current modes of subjectivity, desocialisation, and drudgery."

… But as ever, we ignored all of this. We prefer to wallow in diagnoses and take no account of how we might learn to live with and respond to them. Indeed, both online and offline, this logic is pervasive; the distinctions we make between these two spaces, and the supposed ease with which we can privilege one over the other — for instance, by emphasising the need to ‘touch grass’ — are a misnomer. Cyberspace is a black mirror of meatspace; in both, we are machinic components for systems of control.

What is striking about cyberspace, however, is that we have watched the reterritorialization of this digital Wild West in real time, and in living memory. Nevertheless, whilst we despise meatspace austerity, we continue to be seduced by its application to the Internet. But digital degrowth isn’t the answer either.

…

Of course, the Internet has never been a utopia, but we should at least be awake to the manner in which its potentials have been actively curtailed by a billionaire class afraid of the free circulation of information. The response to this is not retreat, however… what we seek an escape from is the Digital Enclosure Acts of various governments (and the UK is once again leading the vanguard here); we must refocus our attention on the forces shaping various structures of feeling, rather than take these feelings to be unadulterated and subjective ‘truths’.

Yes, another modernity is possible. We are not hopelessly tethered to the only system on offer to us, online or off. And we must recognise that the ever-increasing and draconian restraints placed on cyberspace by capitalism are themselves reactionary responses the discontent of younger, digitally native generations [!]

This quote is a bit of an aside, but so, so telling of the attitude of the modern progressive left:

… Back in 2023, for instance, I was interviewed by Vox for the ‘Blame Capitalism’ podcast series … One episode was due to focus on accelerationism … but in the end, the episode was scrapped and never broadcast, with all attention instead being given to the ‘degrowth’ movement.

It’s a shame. … After decades of austerity, the last thing we need is a ‘leftist’ … rebrand for it. But this is still how we are prone to thinking.

In every instance [a quote from nature poet Gary Synder] is shared online … it seems to invert its own logic by setting up a false dichotomy [between nature/home and modern life]. … [F]or Snyder, often somewhat controversially, it is instead the case that nature is home and your home is nature; i.e. nature is the place I live, no matter where that is.

It is this immanent and Zen-like view of nature that allows Synder, as poet laureate of the Pacific North West, to encapsulate the veil we’ve discussed repeatedly in recent weeks, between subject and void, nature and society. His poems take form as he picks holes in the thin paper that separates planes.

I wonder if his collection No Nature is a response to this bastardisation of his poems. What is it for one of America’s foremost “nature” poets to declare there is no nature? It’s a kind of punk contrarianism. Sometimes there’s nothing more fun than shouting “no fun, not ever.” Similarly, for Synder, true nature is revealed when we declare there is no nature. Synder’s is a kind of poetic postnaturalism in this regard.

…

His later poems have often entertained a post-natural view of the world in which the flows of human life and capital become riparian zones of their own; invisible rivers, no less natural than the ones we already know.

For Synder — like D.H. Lawrence before him — alienation is not caused by capitalism in and of itself; not any longer. Alienation is not the sight of a McDonald’s sign but our othering of it. The false dichotomy of nature and society, which we think we make for nature’s benefit, only others ourselves from its flows. … Nature and society’s modes of productivity mirror each other. What we require more than anything is not a new moralising incision between the two but a way to think both together in a new relation. Mountains and websites.

An example of Gary Synder's postnaturalist poetry:

Like skinny wildweed flowers sticking up
hexagonal “Denny’s” sign
starry “Carl’s”
loopy “McDonald’s”
eight-petaled yellow “Shell”
blue-and-white “Mobil” with a big red “O”

growing in the asphalt riparian zone
by the soft roar of the flow
of Interstate 5.

[W]hat use is ecology to accelerationism, really? It doesn’t mean accelerationism cannot inform a thinking about our environment but environment and ecology are subtly different things. Synder himself makes the point when he is asked in an interview about the poetic distinction between the two terms, in relation to his poem above:

"Look at the words. “Environment” means the surroundings. The surroundings can include an oil refinery, can include all of Los Angeles and the I-5 strip. That’s the environment too, whatever surrounds us. … Everything surrounds everything else. … What is “ecological”? Etymologically, the “household of nature” is what’s being called up. “Ecological” refers to the systems of biological nature, which include energy, and mineral and chemical transformations and pathways. “The environment” is used more commonly to also include human and technological productions. And it’s not an absolute, hard and fast separation. …"

[trying to intorduce ecology into accelerationism] slots accelerationism into a more general trend within the humanities, claiming itself necessary because we can no longer see the trees for the commodity that is wood. It asks: How can we protect nature from Acceleration? In the process, it abjures one of accelerationism’s central observations (going back to the geophilosophy of the Ccru and Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia and even the solar economy of Georges Bataille): Acceleration is natural.

I've written about this before, and am working on another howl of pain about this, if I ever finish it, but this article states well the problems I have with the philosphical outlook of people like Timnit Gebru:

Some critics have decided futurist philosophies and their advocates are bound together in a toxic, reactionary bundle, promoted by a cabal of Silicon Valley elites. This style of conspiracy analysis has a long history and is always a misleading way to understand the world. We need a Left futurism that can address the flaws of these philosophies and frame a liberatory vision.

I'm going to basically quote like… almost all of this essay, to be honest, even going so far as to mirror its structure, because it needs to be said. I want to beat people over the head with it, I want to scream it, and it's so nice to see someone talk about it.

In 2022 [computer scientist and AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru, who was quit/fired from Google] allied with the writer Émile P. Torres […] a trenchant critic of that community. Together Gebru and Torres have begun to promote the theory that Silicon Valley elites, and a global network of corporate, academic and nonprofit institutions, are invested in a toxic bundle of ideologies that they call TESCREAL, short for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism. Guided by this conspiracy framework they have tried to connect the dots between the advocates for these ideas, and support for eugenics, racism and right-wing politics.

[…] a better sociology and intellectual history reveals that each philosophy has a progressive political wing that has been ignored. Moreover the wholesale condemnation of these ideas has cast a pall over all thinking about humanity’s future when we desperately need to grapple with the implications of emerging technologies.

We are living in a pre-cyberpunk world, actively paving the groundwork for corporate-government fusion… William Gibson didn't predict the future, he described the present with better lighting.

[…]

The Death of the Hacker Ethic

There was a time when resistance meant building alternatives… Linux stands as a monument to that effort… Now, resistance is synonymous with "there ought to be a law." … Every single one of these “solutions” makes the problem worse. Large corporations can afford compliance teams. They can navigate complex regulatory frameworks. They can lobby for favorable interpretations. Small businesses and potential competitors cannot. They must then turn to these large companies for infrastructure and expertise, creating even less competition and fewer choices for consumers.

[…]

The Regulatory Capture Loop

Complex regulations get passed that ostensibly protect consumers from big corporations. Small businesses can't afford compliance, so they either fail or get absorbed by larger entities that can handle the regulatory burden. The remaining large corporations then influence how these regulations are interpreted and enforced because they've grown even larger in capital, technical expertise, and manpower.

The result is a system where every attempt at resistance actually strengthens the thing being resisted. It's regulatory capture disguised as consumer protection. It's corporate-government fusion marketed as progressive activism.

This is the Zaibatsu model from Neuromancer, not through dramatic corporate takeovers, but through the slow erosion of the capacity for independent action. Every time we choose regulatory solutions over building alternatives, we're voting for a world where only institutions with massive resources can operate effectively.

[…]

Consensual Hallucination

Gibson's "consensual hallucination" was cyberspace… Today's consensual hallucination is subtler: the belief that regulatory capture is actually resistance. We've collectively agreed to hallucinate that asking power to regulate itself constitutes meaningful opposition.

[…]

Jacking Out of the Matrix

The real hack isn't regulatory, it's cognitive. It's refusing to accept the premise that only institutions can solve institutional problems. The future is still being written in code. The question is: will you be writing it, or will you be asking someone else to write it for you?

This FAQ states my beliefs on technology and transhumanism and their overlap with anarchism almost exactly as I would've stated it — and will probably state it in upcoming half-finished essays — so I decided it's well worth just… putting it here, so it can speak for me and what I believe in and hope for.

A deeply cathartic-to-read critique of the misconceptions of science that so many people on the left have, and a defense of its radicalism and its value, against the spiritualists and mystics, from the perspective of someone who actually understands the epistemological and moral objections being made (such as those of Against Method) instead of merely ignoring them.

Ideas aren't getting harder to find and anyone who tells you otherwise is a coward and I will fight them… Like her, I've worried that I was born too late and all the low-hanging fruit was picked before I got here… Lots of people who think hard about the progress of science seem to come to the same conclusion… All the low-hanging fruit has already been picked… ideas naturally get harder to find over time… The days when a doctoral student could be the sole author of four revolutionary papers… are probably long gone… I find it outrageous. It's not just because it's wrong; it's an affront to the human spirit.

…could any cognitive biases be at play here? … First, all ideas seem obvious in retrospect… Second, it’s always going to feel hard to think of new ideas. What should we do next in physics, biology, music, or film? Gosh, I don’t know! I’d have to think pretty hard, just like everybody before me, and I might not come up with anything, just like almost everybody before me.

So if past ideas seem obvious and future ideas seem obscure, it’s tempting to conclude we live at the inflection point where ideas suddenly get harder to find. And maybe we do. But we’d feel that way even if ideas weren’t getting harder to find, and that should make us a little skeptical.

If our ancestors also thought they were running out of ideas and were wrong, then we should be wary about thinking the same thing… Our ancestors did think that, and they were wrong… Physics was apparently about to end in the 1890s… 'Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.'

Pessimists seem to think that the universe was born with a long list of discoveries, ordered from easy to hard… But knowledge doesn't work like this at all. Every discovery opens up additional discoveries to make… New discoveries replace and compress old ones… I don't really know how any of this works. All the fire-knowledge I'll ever need is encoded into the innovations that surround me… Things change, which means new discoveries to make… The world heats up. Stars explode. Species invade. Tectonic plates shift around.

> "It turns out many scientific studies don't work when you try them again… When the premier journal in social psychology publishes evidence of ESP, you know something is amiss… This chaos is a ladder for young scientists… New tools allow us to answer old questions… Now you can analyze data by pointing and clicking, write your dissertation in a word processor that fixes your typos for you, and run 1,000 participants in an afternoon on Amazon Mechanical Turk."

I don't think we'll actually get far by arguing over the data, because we've got the underlying model all wrong… Science is not like foraging, mining, or drilling, where we keep doing the same thing and it keeps getting harder. It's more like discovering an elevator left for us by aliens… The way to go higher, of course, is not to build taller elevators. It's to invent hot air balloons… Professionalized science, then, may force us to keep building elevators even though we can't get them to go any higher.

'Ideas are getting harder to find' is a pretty bleak thing to believe. It says, 'Look around the world. This is pretty much as good as it gets'… If we want a better world, we have to believe it's possible to create one. And that takes courage, because if you truly believe in a better world, you have to do something about it… Pessimism, like painkillers, merely dulls it.' The way I see it, if you want to write a song the world hasn't heard before, you have two choices… You can spend your time calculating how there’s only a finite amount of different melodies, so eventually humans will run out of songs to write, so why bother. Or you can pick up a guitar and play.

When we hear about technological change and social crisis in the 21st century, it is easy to imagine that we are living through a special period of history. But many eras have grappled with the problems that seem to uniquely plague our own. The beginning of the 20th century was a period of speed and technological splendor (the automobile! the airplane! the bicycle!), shattered nerves, mass anxiety, and a widespread sense that the world had been forever knocked off its historical axis: a familiar stew of ideas. I think we can learn a lot about the present by studying historical periods whose challenges rhyme with our own.

[…]

In my favorite chapters focusing on the years around 19102, Blom describes how turn-of-the-century technology changed the way people thought about art and human nature and how it contributed to a nervous breakdown across the west. Disoriented by the speed of modern times, Europeans and Americans suffered from record-high rates of anxiety and a sense that our inventions had destroyed our humanity. Meanwhile, some artists channeled this disorientation to create some of the greatest art of all time.

The interesting thing to me is that there are two ways to interpret the fact that people have been having concerns about the pace of life, technology, and transportation, having nervous breakdowns and feeling mentally overtaxed, having questions about the commodification or obsoleting of art due to generative machines, and wondering whether tech and society and the market are the products of or threats to human nature, or both, since 1910.

One way is to go the primitivist route and say that this proves it was all a mistake as far back as those problems stretch, and we're only making it worse, stacking mistake on mistake the longer we refuse to treat the root issue: that humans can't evolve fast or far enough to adapt to the machine we've created (or that they're inherently wrong, that we shouldn't want to adapt).

The other way is to say that we adapted to bicycles and cameras, and we can adapt to these new changes too — and in fact it's worth doing, so that we get the chance to transcend human nature as we've known it, to co-evolve with our creations, and to do what they enable us to do.

For myself, I only see one of these as a live option. Our desires, expectations, our very cognitive processes, have all been fundamentally shaped by tech, society, and markets. We could never truly want to undo or throw away what we've created, except that is itself predicated on us not knowing what it would mean to do so due to the conditions precisely created by them. And we could never create a way to enforce and maintain, across the distributed adaptive system that is the world, such a discarding, a "proceeding on without."

Beyond an exhilarating story, Stross' 2005 book "Accelerando" was a thought experiment with ideas like transhumanism, technological "singularity" and rationalism – concepts that had been circulating in Silicon Valley from the late 1980s – and which many believe still animate powerful figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel…

"TESCREAL is what you get when a bunch of relatively bright, technologically-interested former Christians… reinvent religion," Stross said.

"Christianity is a template for syncretistic religions" – belief systems "which pick and match (ideas) from all over the place and glom them together," he added. "TESCREAL is doing exactly the same thing with a bunch of technology-related memes."

I think this is definitely true in a sense — the way that Silicon Valley tech bros assume that something like the singularity, superintelligence, scaling our way to AGI, mind uploading, hard nanotechnology, and cosmic expansion are even possible is very Christain faith like.

At the same time, I see no reason to assume, as many anti-TESCREAL advocates do, that these things must be inherently impossible through some broad, vague appeal to "limited resources" and entropy, as if our current engineering and physics knowledge is essentially the last word, or that we can't find progressively better and more efficient ways to make use of resources, or convust small incremental improvements and refinements from here on outall just small incremental improvements and refinements from here on out. This seems to stem more from a kind of transcendental cynical miserablism that sees anything truly new that's also interesting, useful, and can cause real change, as impossible, and dismisses all evidence to the contrary and all possible evidence for the future.

Nor do I see TESCREAL as any more inherently rooted in, or tending towards, eugenics than many ideologies, including liberalism, pro-choice support, and Marxism (and descendents thereof); I think it's much more to do with the tendency of highly privileged and insulated white guys to recapitulate eugenics in literally any ideology they glom on to. I think the

Likewise, I don't think that any of these developments — in any of the form that might be actually possible, like perhaps travel within the solar system ala The Expanse, soft nanomachines based on bioengineering, the singularity and something like AGI through man-computer symbiosis, transhumanism through more concrete means like progressive medical and lifestyle improvements and biomodifications, as well as actual cybernetic implants when needed, which we already do — would be inherently bad. I agree that the TESCREAL assumption that they'd be inherently good, as opposed to something we'd have to fight over the right to shape and direct and distribute in order to make their outcomes positive, and that they'd inherently work perfectly, as opposed to being highly imperfect just like all previous technology was and is, is also very Christian.

But at the same time, I see the TESCREAL assumption that e.g. transhumanism is inherently evil, inherently a form of eugenics, and will always lead to negative outcomes, and likewise for a million other types of technology that TESCREAL wants, to step from just more Christian thinking, or just the naturalistic fallacy. It's also just bad thinking in most cases. For instance, the objection that we shouldn't create technologies that vastly increase intelligence or longjevity, because the benefits of that technology would ramify first to the rich, which is unfair and may centralize power, is just utterly idiotic to the point of like, straw-man Luddism, since one could make the exact same argument about every medical advance since penicillin. The point is to change society so we can give more people access to these advances, not to eliminate them just because not everyone can have them. (And this will, in part, be a product of market forces, when/if freed from healthcare radical monopoly.)

The one wherein Charlie Stross explains that corporations are slow AI, and the horrors that has led to, as they are real-life paperclip maximizers. As well as the horrors modern AI has and may also lead to, in the hands of these slower AIs. Some good quotes:

…for 99.9% of human existence, the future was static. Then something happened, and the future began to change, increasingly rapidly, until we get to the present day when things are moving so fast that it's barely possible to anticipate trends from month to month.

Some of you might assume that, as the author of books like "Singularity Sky" and "Accelerando", I attribute this to an impending technological singularity, to our development of self-improving artificial intelligence and mind uploading and the whole wish-list of transhumanist aspirations promoted by the likes of Ray Kurzweil. Unfortunately this isn't the case. I think transhumanism is a warmed-over Christian heresy. While its adherents tend to be vehement atheists, they can't quite escape from the history that gave rise to our current western civilization... When you look at the AI singularity as a narrative, and identify the numerous places in the story where the phrase "… and then a miracle happens" occurs, it becomes apparent pretty quickly that they've reinvented Christianity.

…once you start probing the nether regions of transhumanist thought and run into concepts like Roko's Basilisk—by the way, any of you who didn't know about the Basilisk before are now doomed to an eternity in AI hell—you realize they've mangled it to match some of the nastiest ideas in Presybterian Protestantism.

…if it looks like a religion it's probably a religion. I don't see much evidence for human-like, self-directed artificial intelligences coming along any time now, and a fair bit of evidence that nobody except some freaks in university cognitive science departments even want it. What we're getting, instead, is self-optimizing tools that defy human comprehension but are not, in fact, any more like our kind of intelligence than a Boeing 737 is like a seagull. So I'm going to wash my hands of the singularity as an explanatory model without further ado—I'm one of those vehement atheists too—and try and come up with a better model for what's happening to us.

As my fellow SF author Ken MacLeod likes to say, the secret weapon of science fiction is history… We science fiction writers tend to treat history as a giant toy chest to raid whenever we feel like telling a story. With a little bit of history it's really easy to whip up an entertaining yarn about a galactic empire that mirrors the development and decline of the Hapsburg Empire, or to re-spin the October Revolution as a tale of how Mars got its independence.

History gives us the perspective to see what went wrong in the past, and to look for patterns, and check whether those patterns apply to the present and near future.

…looking in particular at the history of the past 200-400 years—the age of increasingly rapid change—one glaringly obvious deviation from the norm of the preceding three thousand centuries—is the development of Artificial Intelligence, which happened no earlier than 1553 and no later than 1844.

I'm talking about the very old, very slow AIs we call corporations, of course… Here's the thing about corporations: they're clearly artificial, but legally they're people. They have goals, and operate in pursuit of these goals. And they have a natural life cycle. In the 1950s, a typical US corporation on the S&P 500 index had a lifespan of 60 years, but today it's down to less than 20 years.

Corporations are cannibals; they consume one another. They are also hive superorganisms, like bees or ants. For their first century and a half they relied entirely on human employees for their internal operation, although they are automating their business processes increasingly rapidly this century. Each human is only retained so long as they can perform their assigned tasks, and can be replaced with another human, much as the cells in our own bodies are functionally interchangeable (and a group of cells can, in extremis, often be replaced by a prosthesis). To some extent corporations can be trained to service the personal desires of their chief executives, but even CEOs can be dispensed with if their activities damage the corporation, as Harvey Weinstein found out a couple of months ago.

…A paperclip maximizer is a term of art for a goal-seeking AI that has a single priority, for example maximizing the number of paperclips in the universe. The paperclip maximizer is able to improve itself in pursuit of that goal but has no ability to vary its goal, so it will ultimately attempt to convert all the metallic elements in the solar system into paperclips, even if this is obviously detrimental to the wellbeing of the humans who designed it.

…slow AIs are based on an architecture that is designed to maximize return on shareholder investment, even if by doing so they cook the planet the shareholders have to live on.

The problem with corporations is that despite their overt goals… they are all subject to instrumental convergence insofar as they all have a common implicit paperclip-maximizer goal: to generate revenue. If they don't make money, they are eaten by a bigger predator or they go bust. Making money is an instrumental goal—it's as vital to them as breathing is for us mammals, and without pursuing it they will fail to achieve their final goal, whatever it may be. Corporations generally pursue their instrumental goals—notably maximizing revenue—as a side-effect of the pursuit of their overt goal. But sometimes they try instead to manipulate the regulatory environment they operate in, to ensure that money flows towards them regardless.

Regulatory agencies are our current political systems' tool of choice for preventing paperclip maximizers from running amok. But unfortunately they don't always work.

One failure mode that you should be aware of is regulatory capture…

Another failure mode is regulatory lag, when a technology advances so rapidly that regulations are laughably obsolete by the time they're issued…

So, to recap: firstly, we already have paperclip maximizers (and Musk's AI alarmism is curiously mirror-blind). Secondly, we have mechanisms for keeping them in check, but they don't work well against AIs that deploy the dark arts—especially corruption and bribery—and they're even worse againt true AIs that evolve too fast for human-mediated mechanisms like the Law to keep up with.

It seems to me that our current political upheavals are best understood as arising from the capture of post-1917 democratic institutions by large-scale AIs. Everywhere I look I see voters protesting angrily against an entrenched establishment that seems determined to ignore the wants and needs of their human voters in favour of the machines.

If we look at our historical very slow AIs, what lessons can we learn from them about modern AI—the flash flood of unprecedented deep learning and big data technologies that have overtaken us in the past decade?

…We made a fundamentally flawed, terrible design decision back in 1995… to fund the build-out of the public world wide web—as opposed to the earlier, government-funded corporate and academic internet—by monetizing eyeballs via advertising revenue.

…The ad-supported web that we live with today wasn't inevitable. If you recall the web as it was in 1994, there were very few ads at all, and not much in the way of commerce…. the naive initial assumption was that the transaction cost of setting up a TCP/IP connection over modem was too high to be supported by per-use microbilling, so we would bill customers indirectly, by shoving advertising banners in front of their eyes and hoping they'd click through and buy something.

Unfortunately, advertising is an industry. Which is to say, it's the product of one of those old-fashioned very slow AIs I've been talking about. Advertising tries to maximize its hold on the attention of the minds behind each human eyeball: the coupling of advertising with web search was an inevitable outgrowth.

Let me give you four examples—of new types of AI applications—that are going to warp our societies even worse than the old slow AIs of yore have done. This isn't an exhaustive list: these are just examples. We need to work out a general strategy for getting on top of this sort of AI before they get on top of us.

He lists:

• Firstly, Political hacking tools: social graph-directed propaganda
• Secondly, an adjunct to deep learning targeted propaganda is the use of neural network generated false video media.
• Thanks to deep learning, neuroscientists have mechanised the process of making apps more addictive
• geolocation-aware social media scraping deep learning application, that uses a gamified, competitive interface to reward its "players" for joining in acts of mob violence against whoever the app developer hates

The only place I disagree with him here is that, despite listing out all the ways in which regulations are wholly inadequate for this dealing with this pace of change, and in fact just tend to make things worse, seemingly his main proposal is to regulate machine learning!

I think this is a result of a very Christian attitude toward the state: because it's supposed to be in control of everything in society, it can be used to fix anything that feels scary and out of your control, as long as you ~pray hard enough~ vote for the right people and the right laws. Because the alternative admission — that nobody can control where this is going, not even really the CEOs, who are bound up in the ever-accelerating paperclip-maximization machine of capital almost as much as we are — is too terrifying.

A sober, level-headed, serious, yet charitable takedown of the singularity mythology of exponentially accelerating scientific progress.

This prediction seems to us quite far-fetched. Of course, we are aware that the history of science and technology is littered with people who confidently assert that some event can’t happen, only to be later proven wrong—often in spectacular fashion. We acknowledge that it is possible but highly unlikely that Kurzweil will eventually be vindicated. An adult brain is a finite thing, so its basic workings can ultimately be known through sustained human effort. But if the singularity is to arrive… it will take unforeseeable and fundamentally unpredictable breakthroughs, and not because the Law of Accelerating Returns made it the inevitable result of a specific exponential rate of progress.

[…] Kurzweil’s reasoning rests on the Law of Accelerating Returns and its siblings, but these are not physical laws. […] like other attempts to forecast the future from the past, these “laws” will work until they don’t.

[…] It is true that computer hardware technology can develop amazingly quickly […] However, creating the software for a real singularity-level computer intelligence will require fundamental scientific progress beyond where we are today. […] But history tells us that the process of original scientific discovery just doesn’t behave [exponentially], especially in complex areas like neuroscience, nuclear fusion, or cancer research. […] Instead, scientific advances are often irregular, with unpredictable flashes of insight punctuating the slow grind-it-out lab work of creating and testing theories that can fit with experimental observations.

[…]

As we go deeper and deeper in our understanding of natural systems, we typically find that we require more and more specialized knowledge to characterize them, and we are forced to continuously expand our scientific theories in more and more complex ways. Understanding the detailed mechanisms of human cognition is a task that is subject to this complexity brake.

[…]

Singularity proponents occasionally appeal to developments in artificial intelligence (AI) as a way to get around the slow rate of overall scientific progress in bottom-up, neuroscience-based approaches to cognition. […] Just as in neuroscience, the AI-based route to achieving singularity-level computer intelligence seems to require many more discoveries, some new Nobel-quality theories, and probably even whole new research approaches that are incommensurate with what we believe now. This kind of basic scientific progress doesn’t happen on a reliable exponential growth curve. So although developments in AI might ultimately end up being the route to the singularity, again the complexity brake slows our rate of progress, and pushes the singularity considerably into the future.

Culture shock is the effect that immersion in a strange culture has on the unprepared visitor. … It causes a breakdown in communication, a misreading of reality, an inability to cope. Yet culture shock is relatively mild in comparison with a much more serious malady that might be called “future shock.” Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future. It may well be the most important disease of tomorrow.

This is the essay that popularly coined the term "future shock," later converted to a book by the same author published in 1970 entitled, appropriately enough, Future Shock. I think that its diagnosis of future shock is as accurate today as it was then, perhaps moreso:

Take an individual out of his own culture and set him down suddenly in an environment sharply different from his own, with a different set of cues to react to, different conceptions of time, space, work, love, religion, sex, and everything else; then cut him off from any hope of retreat to a more familiar social landscape, and the dislocation he suffers is doubly severe. Moreover, if this new culture is itself in a constant turmoil of revolutionary transition… the sense of disorientation will be still further intensified. Given few clues as to what kind of behavior is rational under the radically new circumstances, the victim may well become a hazard to himself and others.

Now imagine not merely an individual but an entire society, an entire generation—including its weakest [such as the elderly!], least intelligent, and most irrational members—suddenly transported into this new world. The result is mass disorientation, future shock on a grand scale.

Many of this essay's predictions about the problems we'd face are also startingly accurate, some even moreso than the author could've known. Predictions include:

• The proliferation of information beyond what we can deal with: "The same is true of another kind of mining—the mining of knowledge. Information, itself a prime catalytic force in the process of social change, is proliferating at a mind- numbing rate."
• Increasing demand for nonrenewable resources (both an indicator of acceleration and a future problem): "man took about as much out of mines before 1910 as he did after 1910."
• Increasing demand for energy (again, both an indicator and a problem) "half of all the energy consumed by man in the past two thousand years has been consumed within the last one hundred."
• The shrinking of agriculture as an occupation and a surplus of food we can't allocate well: "ours is the century in which, at least in many countries, agriculture has ceased to be the dominant economic activity … In contrast, in the United States today only 10 per cent of the population is engaged in agriculture, and this small percentage is capable of producing more food than anyone knows what to do with… as Boulding observes, that “if present trends continue it will not be long before we can produce all the food that we need with 5 per cent, or even less, of the population.”"
• The death of blue collar jobs: "For the first time in human history a society, having shrugged off the economic domination of agriculture, proceeded to shrug off the domination of manual labor."
• Urbanization: "According to Professor Kingsley Davis, an authority on urbanization, by the year 2000—only thirty- five years off— one quarter of all the people in the world will be living in cities of a hundred thousand or more. By 2050 the figure will be one half of the world’s population. What this shift will mean in terms of values, family structure, jobs, politics, and the structure of cities themselves, is staggering."
• Perpetually short lifespans of corporations and products: "The men and women who live, work, and play in a society where whole categories of merchandise seen on the shelves of the nearby store last month are no longer manufactured today and where their own place in the bureaucratic structure of society is being constantly reshuffled, will have to use entirely new yardsticks for measuring the passage of time in their own lives."
• How technology integrating ever more deeply into our lives (albiet, not through being integrated into our bodys, but we are nevertheless cyborgs) and changing us as a result: "Even our conceptions of self will be transformed in a world in which the line between man and machine grows increasingly blurred… What new possibilities will it open? What limitations will it place on work, play, sex, intellectual or aesthetic responses? How will it feel to have information transferred electronically between computer and brain?"
• Future shock around genetic engineering (mRNA vaccines and designer babies, anyone?): "As Professor Boulding points out… “We have the code of life. We can’t write it yet, but that cannot be too far off. Artificial virus is close. This is the synthesis of life…"
• Questions about who gets life extension treatments and when: "Even if what is involved is only a finite extension of the life span, it creates all kinds of new ethical problems. Who gets immortality or added years? On what basis?"
• Job instability undercutting the stability of people's lives and even identities: "…“the job” was a central organizing principle of life. One’s living arrangements, one’s hours, income, everything, was determined… In the past it was possible to know in advance what occupations would exist when a boy became a man. Today the life span of occupations has also been compressed. … within a generation the notion of serving in a single occupation for one’s entire life may seem quaintly antique. Individuals may need to be trained to serve successively in three, four, or half a dozen different professions in the course of a career. The job will no longer serve as man’s anchor and organizing principle."
• Although it's in the context of incorrect predictions about leisure time, this future shock question he says will be raised is on point, especially with his hints at violence and irrational behavior being a result of future shock, given the reactionary fascist movements we're seeing sweep men of all ages: "How will the role of the father be transformed with the loss of his historic role as family provider?"
• Generative AI — yeah, seriously. This one was insane. "…how well prepared are we, as a society, to cope with the sudden new sensations, pains, intellectual turnabouts, eruptions, and shifts in perception that are likely to confront us as we speed forward into a culture in which computers can learn, and can improve upon their own performance, in which man is no longer the only manifestation of high- level intelligence on the face of the earth…?" (I don't think we can call generative AI intelligent, but it certainly does many tasks we used to associate strongly with intelligence, and that's about the same thing when it comes to future shock.)

Then of course there's the technologies that have been around for awhile in our time that caused future shock in his, and put us on the path of accelerating future shock today, such as:

All these changes represent giant spurts in movements that have been continuous, in one form or another, since history began. If we add to these truly historic jumps the list of developments or processes that simply did not begin until the twentieth century—air travel and space flight, television, the development of nuclear energy, the invention of the computer, the discovery of DNA with its possibilities for the control of evolution—the sharpness of the break with the past becomes even clearer. Given these, it becomes impossible to sustain the argument that what is happening now is anything like “normal” progress, even for the kind of industrial society we have known for the past century. It is not merely a “second industrial revolution.” Viewed as a violent break with historic continuity, our age takes on a significance that few ages in the past have had.

When reading this essay I think it's important to remember that "whether any or all of these developments occur precisely in the way suggested is not important." The core point is that:

we can anticipate volcanic dislocations, twists and reversals, not merely in our social structure, but also in our hierarchy of values and in the way individuals perceive and conceive reality. Such massive changes, coming with increasing velocity, will disorient, bewilder, and crush many people. … If the degree of change and the speed of that change is even remotely close to what I have suggested, it must be obvious that the shift to Professor Boulding’s “postcivilization” may place unendurable stress on a great many people. For the current upbringing of most people, and the subtly inculcated sense of time that comes with it, are both inimical to adaptability.

But while these time orientations differ, they all assume either an unpredictable or an unchanging future. The assumption of the middle- and upper- class samples is that the contours of society will stay the same in the future. When a middle- class mother talks about Johnny becoming a lawyer, she is deceiving herself and her son because she has no conception of what being a lawyer will mean two decades hence. … The fact is—and simple observation of one’s own friends and associates will confirm it—that even the most educated people today operate on the assumption that society is relatively static. At best they attempt to plan by making simple straight- line projections of present- day trends. The result is unreadiness to meet the future when it arrives. In short, future shock.

His prescriptions are pretty good too. In essence:

1. Train the mental flexibility needed to deal with the ethical, economic, social, and epistemic implications of wildly new and unfamiliar things, through speculative fiction, not as a prophecy of what will come to pass, but as a serious of hyptheticals to be used as mental exercises.

Our children should be studying Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein and William Tenn not because these writers can tell them about rocket ships and time machines but, more important, because they can lead young minds through an imaginative exploration of the jungle of political, social, psychological, and ethical issues that will confront these children as adults. Science fiction should be required reading for Future I.

1. Make sure that people are familiar with logic, statistics, mathematics, and the fact gathering (and filtering out misinformation, etc) needed to get a grasp of the present and the immanent future.

in addition to encouraging the speculative turn of mind, we must undertake to train individuals in the techniques of prediction and of scientific method in general. This does not mean more courses in biology or physics or chemistry. It means more attention to philosophy and logic, and perhaps special courses in “how to predict.” How many of us, even among the educated public, understand the meaning of a random sample, or of probability, or of prediction by correlation? This does not mean that all of us need to be statisticians or logicians or mathematicians. But the principles of scientific prediction can and should be grasped by every youngster who graduates from high school, for these are not merely the tools of “scientific research,” they are powerful instruments for dealing rationally with the problems of everyday existence. Ignorance of them constitutes a form of functional illiteracy in the contemporary world.

The final paragraph is great:

Man’s capacity for adaptation may have limits, but they have yet to be defined. If, as Margaret Mead has shown, the Manus of New Guinea could, within a twenty- five year period, pass from Stone Age primitivism into a twentieth- century way of life, and do so happily and successfully, modern man should be able to traverse the passage to postcivilization. But he can accomplish this grand historic advance only if he forms a better, clearer, stronger conception of what lies ahead. This is the only remedy for the phenomenon of future shock.

George Osborne has committed the Conservatives to targeting "full employment", saying that tax and welfare changes would help achieve it.

Firstly, this is impossible. Secondly, explaining why is … well, George Orwell coined a word to describe this sort of thing, in 1984: Crimestop— […] Today, in the political discourse of the west, it is almost unthinkably hard to ask a very simple question: why should we work?

There are two tests I'd apply to any job when deciding whether it's what anthropologist David Graeber terms a Bullshit Job.

Test (a): Is it good for you (the worker)?

Test (b): Is it good for other people?

[…] On the other hand, many of us are trapped in jobs that pass neither test (a) nor test (b). […] We let ourselves get trapped in these jobs because our society is organized around the principle that we are required to work in order to receive the money we require in order to eat. […] But people are still supposed to do something. People are, in fact, defined by what they do, not by who they are.

As John Maynard Keynes observed in the 1930s, we produce material goods more efficiently today than during previous eras of history: our economic growth is predicated on this. Why should we not divert some of our growth into growing our leisure time, rather than growing our physical wealth? We ought to be able to make ends meet perfectly well with an average 15 hour working week […] And indeed in some cultures and countries this happens, to some extent. […]

It's also quite scary when you consider that we're entering an era of technological unemployment. More and more jobs are being automated: they aren't going to provide money, social validation, or occupation for anyone any longer. We saw this first with agriculture and the internal combustion engine and artificial fertilizers, which reduced the rural workforce from around 90% of the population in the 17th-18th century to around 1% today in the developed world. We've seen it in steel, coal, and the other 19th century smokestack industries, which at their peak employed 30-50% of the population in factories—an inconceivable statistic today, even though our net output in these areas has increased. We're now seeing it in mind-worker fields from law (less bodies needed to search law libraries) through architecture (3D printers and CAD software mean less time spent fiddling with cardboard models or poring over drafting tables). Service jobs are also being automated: from lights-out warehousing to self-service checkouts, the number of bodies needed is diminishing.

We can still produce enough food and stuff to feed and house and clothe everybody. We can still run a growth economy. But we don't seem to know how to allocate resources to people for whom there are no jobs. […] rather than admitting that the core assumption—that we must starve if we can't find work—is simply invalid. […]

When he prescribes full employment for the population, what he's actually asking for is that the proles get out of his hair; that one of his peers' corporations finds a use for idle hands that would otherwise be subsisting on Jobseekers Allowance but which can now be coopted, via the miracle of workfare, into producing something for very little at all. And by using the threat of workfare, real world wages can be negotiated down and down and down, until labour is cheap enough that any taskmaster who cares to crack the whip can afford as much as they need. These aren't jobs that past test (a); for the most part they don't pass test (b) either. But until we come up with a better way of allocating resources so that all may eat, or until we throw off the shackles of Orwellian Crimestop and teach ourselves to think directly about the implications of wasting a third of our waking lives on occupations that harm ourselves and others, this is what we're stuck with …

This is the real solution to automation: not coming up with bullshit workfare jobs that depress wages and depress people, nor banning or heavily regulating automation, so that we're doing things far more inefficiently than we have to, to make sure everyone has "something to do," which is just workfare with extra steps, but changing our society to account for the fact that we can now keep everyone at a pretty high standard of living without everyone working all the time.

I've always found Crimethinc kind of insufferable, and after reading (well, listening to) Days of War, Nights of Rage and seeing their comments on things like poverty and wearing deoderant of all things, it only reinforced my notion that I really don't like them. It's possible to do actually useful things that help yourself and your community without giving into vanguardism on the one hand or co-option and total implication in the system on the other, but they're so focused on purity and radical aesthetics and having fun that they're incapable of getting their hands dirty to do any of that. Moreover, it's possible to be what Bookchin called a "lifestylist" without it actually being bad or a problem, but Crimethinc seems to glorify a sort of hippie crust punk dropout lifestyle of play acting at poverty.

Many aspects of crimethinc reference the Situationist Internationale and a large chunk of their ideas are based around the Situationist concept “the transformation of everyday life”. The Situationists were heavily influenced by Marx and CWC are heavily influenced by American consumer culture it would seem. The call to transform everyday is a call to smash the current exploitative system, to participate in the class struggle, an ongoing historical conflict between the proletariat and the ruling class. Crimethinc substitute this class struggle with a teenage individualistic rebellion based on having fun now. Shoplifting, dumpster diving, quitting work are all put forward as revolutionary ways to live outside the system but amount to nothing more than a parasitic way of life which depends on capitalism without providing any real challenge. […]

The reality of the situation is that you can’t boycott your way out of capitalism . Capitalism is a system of coercion and control, we don’t work to support the system, we work because we need food and shelter and healthcare and the only way to get that under capitalism is with money. The only way we can get money is by selling our labour — the alternative is to rot, that’s Capitalism. I don’t want to feed my kids out of a dumpster or have to scam free healthcare if I get cancer, it’s not appealing or practical. There’s nothing revolutionary about using your white, middle-class, western privilege to remove yourself from the system at the expense of those who remain trapped in it. None of us are free until we all are.

This quote, expanded upon to like a paragraph in the actual Days of War, Nights of Rage book, also made me so fucking angry as someone who's had the huge privilege to be able to avoid these things, but has been adjacent to them for most of my adult life because of who I love and who I'm friends with, and my own disabilities and marginalization:

“Poverty, unemployment, homelessness — if you’re not having fun, you’re not doing it right!”

As "Rethinking" rightly says:

The arrogance of middle class kids (just like the hippies) supposing to change by world by roughing it as “poor” people for a few years is captured perfectly in the quote on the back cover of their book evasion. […] Condescending, privileged, middle class crap. The only people who could think that poverty is in any way fun are wealthy kids playing at being poor for a few years, the daily reality of poverty, unemployment and homelessness for the average person is very serious and something anarchists should always organise against rather than mock.

This is another juicy quote:

One of crimethinc’s more recent publications “recipes for disaster:an anarchist cookbook”, is indicative of the massive problems with them. The book is a somewhat interesting list of pranks, scams and activist information. […] An eclectic mix of information, most of which is crap the rest of which is useless without political understanding. […] The book shies away from serious revolutionary information like how to organise a union in your workplace, how to organise at school, how to make contact and work with communities in struggle, how to break out of the activist ghetto, how to set up a social centre, how to provide prisoner support or how to support asylum seekers etc. All the activities amount to little more than activist busy-work, something to waste your time with while being a “drop-out”, ease your social conscience and not have to do any hard work or compromise yourself by working with people who are complicit in the system.

A lot of Crimethinc's work also feels like a gleeful embrace of the implications of transcendental miserablism, a sort of "we're radical because we LIKE that (we believe) anarchism requires asceticism and a gentle decline into that good night."

This is another good criticism of CrimethInc — placing special emphasis on something that I did notice when reading Days of War, which is that for avowed amoralists who dislike puritainism, they're quite puritanical and speak in a lot of generalized, absolutist moral terms, in ways that are pretty unjustified.

Despite your cautions against ideology, your book is riddled with simplistic, unqualified declarations. In some places you are admirably open and modest, but in others you come on like you have definitive answers to practically everything from the meaning of life to whether people should wear deodorant or not. […] Just as you present rebellious actions as almost purely GOOD, you tend to present the system as almost purely BAD. In reality, just as most revolts and radical movements have been full of mistakes and limitations, many aspects of the present society are positive, or at least potentially so. […]

There is also a recurring moralizing simplisticness. It is good that you recognize the element of necessary hypocrisy and compromise in our lives. But a lot of your agonizing over whether this or that practice is hypocritical is, to me, a phoney, nonexistent issue. I do not view my options primarily in terms of whether I am "implicated" in capitalism, as if that were some sort of sin to be avoided at all cost. Nor, conversely, do I consider that I am accomplishing anything very notable if I avoid some such compromise, as if radical struggle were a matter of more and more people gradually becoming less and less implicated in the prevailing system. That perspective is just as simplistic as pacifists' feeling that we will arrive at peace by more and more people becoming pacifists (while failing to confront economic and other factors that engender wars despite most people's preference for peace). While I salute the sense of experimentation of your friend who tried to live off garbage pickings instead of buying food, it does not seem to me that such choices have much to do with radical strategy.

In the same essay there's a critique of a similar collective from the UK, attached by the author because he believes the same critiques apply to CrimethInc, and I agree:

I don't have time to comment on Theft #2 in any detail. The most notable criticism I have is that the last chapter is sometimes rather simplistic. While I think it's fine to recommend that people seek pursuits that are enjoyable and satisfying to them, it seems to me rather silly to declare that life "should be" "perpetual ecstasy" etc. This kind of "should be" amounts to little more than that you think it would be nice if things were that way. It's ultimately pretty meaningless, like saying that insects "should" have "the right" to live freely without being eaten by birds. It's a false reasoning which you have probably picked up from Vaneigem. He rightly criticizes traditional leftism's overemphasis on sacrificing for the cause, but then flips into an equally unjustified opposite conclusion that pleasure is the supreme criterion for everything, and then to the even more absurd implication that a successful revolution will somehow magically produce endless unalloyed pleasure.

This is an important point; Emma Goldman may have said that she wanted no part in a revolution without dancing, but a revolution that's only dancing is just a dance party. It gets even more cutting, though:

Again, I think it's good that you encourage people to reexamine their lives, to reduce addictive consumership, and to make space for relaxation and reflection. But you have to be careful not to be too rigid in your recommendations. "The more you consume, the less you live" makes a good graffiti, it conveys a good general point. But it shouldn't be taken too literally, as if it were a precise scientific formula. In your SHIT percentage test, for example, you more or less equate "the more of yourself is actually yours" (a rather vague notion in any case) with lower SHIT percentages. This amounts to an inverse economic fetishization, a sort of anti-economic puritanism, as if enjoyment was always inversely proportional to the degree of economic taint.

And, most relevant to Libidinal Economy (which I want to read) and what's discussed in "Notes on Accelerationism":

Actually, of course, in many cases an activity that creates profit for someone may nevertheless be more enjoyable than another activity that puristically avoids the market. The best things in life are not always free, even if they "should" be. If you frequently present this kind of over-simplified formula, people with enough sense to know better will not take you seriously regarding the many other areas where you have valid points to make.

"You dare not say the only important thing… and in this way situate yourselves on the most dispicable side, the moralistic side" indeed.

A good distinction from one of the comments:

…i think the point is that if you consider a personal aversion to sweatshop clothing a political act that makes any difference to the existence of sweatshops, that is the kind of substitution for collective action that characterises individualism/lifestylism.

Soundly and neatly deals with primitivism as an ideology:

• It's rejection of the fundamental anarchist project – showing how we can have civilization, ecological sustainability, and liberty at the same time – for the premise of liberals – that these things are incompatible – just a slightly different conclusion.
• The 'population question', which renders primitivism a totally incoherent and unworkable ideology with nothing to offer outside a facile intellectual mind game of critique.
• The violent, coercive, and borderline fascist implications of any attempt to reduce the human population at a large scale.
• Responses to some responses to these points.

A local Luddite movement in Englandshire is up in non-mechanical arms this week, as one of their young brethrens attempt to do a good turn has taken a turn for the unpleasant, with name calling and even some physical gesticulating in the general direction of the young man in question.

Short answer: No.

In the last decade many publications have appeared on degrowth as a strategy to confront environmental and social problems. We undertake a systematic review of their content, data and methods. This involves the use of computational linguistics to identify main topics investigated. Based on a sample of 561 studies we conclude that: (1) content covers 11 main topics; (2) the large majority (almost 90%) of studies are opinions rather than analysis; (3) few studies use quantitative or qualitative data, and even fewer ones use formal modelling; (4) the first and second type tend to include small samples or focus on non-representative cases; (5) most studies offer ad hoc and subjective policy advice, lacking policy evaluation and integration with insights from the literature on environmental/climate policies; (6) of the few studies on public support, a majority concludes that degrowth strategies and policies are socially-politically infeasible; (7) various studies represent a “reverse causality” confusion, i.e. use the term degrowth not for a deliberate strategy but to denote economic decline (in GDP terms) resulting from exogenous factors or public policies; (8) few studies adopt a system-wide perspective – instead most focus on small, local cases without a clear implication for the economy as a whole. We illustrate each of these findings for concrete studies.

This is a really down to earth, practical, useful appraisal of the actual practical possibility of space colonization, by science fiction author Charlie Stross. Some key quotes:

I write SF for a living. Possibly because of this, folks seem to think I ought to be an enthusiastic proponent of space exploration and space colonization. Space exploration? Yep, that's a fair cop — I'm all in favour of advancing the scientific enterprise. But actual space colonisation is another matter entirely …

Try to get a handle on this: it takes us 2-5 years to travel two inches. But the proponents of interstellar travel are talking about journeys of ten miles. That's the first point I want to get across: that if the distances involved in interplanetary travel are enormous, and the travel times fit to rival the first Australian settlers, then the distances and times involved in interstellar travel are mind-numbing.

This is not to say that interstellar travel is impossible; quite the contrary. But to do so effectively you need either (a) outrageous amounts of cheap energy, or (b) highly efficient robot probes, or (c) a magic wand. And in the absence of (c) you're not going to get any news back from the other end in less than decades. Even if (a) is achievable, or by means of (b) we can send self-replicating factories and have them turn distant solar systems into hives of industry, and more speculatively find some way to transmit human beings there, they are going to have zero net economic impact on our circumstances (except insofar as sending them out costs us money).

What do I mean by outrageous amounts of cheap energy? … For a less explosive reference point, our entire planetary economy runs on roughly 4 terawatts of electricity (4 x 10¹² watts). So it would take our total planetary electricity production for a period of half a million seconds — roughly 5 days — to supply the necessary va-va-voom [in order to move a capsule of about the gross weight of a fully loaded Volvo V70 automobile to Proxima Centauri in less than a human lifetime].

Our one astronaut, 10% of c mission approximates well to an unmanned flight, but what about longer-term expeditions? Generation ships are a staple of SF; they're slow (probably under 1% of c) and they carry a self-sufficient city-state. … We've cut the peak velocity by an order of magnitude, but we've increased the payload requirement by an order of magnitude per passenger — and we need enough passengers to make a stable society fly. I'd guess a sensible lower number would be on the order of 200 people, the size of a prehistoric primate troupe. … we're actually requiring much more energy than our solitary high-speed explorer.

What about our own solar system?

After contemplating the vastness of interstellar space, our own solar system looks almost comfortingly accessible at first. Exploring our own solar system is a no-brainer: we can do it, we are doing it, and interplanetary exploration is probably going to be seen as one of the great scientific undertakings of the late 20th and early 21st century, when the history books get written.

…

But when we start examining the prospects for interplanetary colonization things turn gloomy again. … Whichever way you cut it, sending a single tourist to the moon is going to cost not less than $50,000 — and a more realistic figure, for a mature reusable, cheap, rocket-based lunar transport cycle is more like $1M. And that's before you factor in the price of bringing them back … The moon is about 1.3 light seconds away. If we want to go panning the (metaphorical) rivers for gold, we'd do better to send teleoperator-controlled robots; it's close enough that we can control them directly, and far enough away that the cost of transporting food and creature comforts for human explorers is astronomical. There probably are niches for human workers on a moon base, but only until our robot technologies are somewhat more mature than they are today …

When we look at the rest of the solar system, the picture is even bleaker. … As Bruce Sterling has puts it: "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach."

…

Actually, there probably is a good reason for sending human explorers to Mars. And that's the distance: at up to 30 minutes, the speed of light delay means that remote control of robots on the Martian surface is extremely tedious. Either we need autonomous roots that can be assigned tasks and carry them out without direct human supervision, or we need astronauts in orbit or on the ground to boss the robot work gangs around. …

Space elevators, if we build them, will invalidate a lot of what I just said. Some analyses of the energy costs of space elevators suggest that a marginal cost of $350/kilogram to geosynchronous orbit should be achievable without waving any magic wands … space elevators are attractive because they're a scalable technology; you can use one to haul into space the material to build more. So, long term, space elevators may give us not-unreasonably priced access to space, including jaunts to the lunar surface for a price equivalent to less than $100,000 in today's money. At which point, settlement would begin to look economically feasible, except …

[but] We're human beings. We evolved to flourish in a very specific environment that covers perhaps 10% of our home planet's surface area.

Now, these problems are subject to a variety of approaches — including medical ones … But even so, when you get down to it, there's not really any economically viable activity on the horizon for people to engage in that would require them to settle on a planet or asteroid and live there for the rest of their lives. In general, when we need to extract resources from a hostile environment we tend to build infrastructure to exploit them (such as oil platforms) but we don't exactly scurry to move our families there. Rather, crews go out to work a long shift, then return home to take their leave.

And that, I submit, is the closest metaphor we'll find for interplanetary colonization. Most of the heavy lifting more than a million kilometres from Earth will be done by robots, overseen by human supervisors who will be itching to get home and spend their hardship pay. And closer to home, the commercialization of space will be incremental and slow, driven by our increasing dependence on near-earth space for communications, positioning, weather forecasting, and (still in its embryonic stages) tourism. But the domed city on Mars is going to have to wait for a magic wand or two to do something about the climate, or reinvent a kind of human being who can thrive in an airless, inhospitable environment.

Colonize the Gobi desert, colonise the North Atlantic in winter — then get back to me about the rest of the solar system!