Posts tagged with accelerationism
Accelerationism Triptych 01: Future shock fever
There is something feverishly exciting about watching the deterritorialization swing of technocapitalism work. Careers disintigrate into hypermobile, infinitely reconfigurable, on-demand gigs; old markets are dissolved as new ones are assembled from their molecular media as the fundamental nature of production and demand is altered; technology is ceaslessly iterated in a blind genetic algorithm looking for the next thing; any attempts at societal control are left in the dust, and in the process
Accelerationism Triptych 01: Future shock fever
There is something feverishly exciting about watching the deterritorialization swing of technocapitalism work. Careers disintigrate into hypermobile, infinitely reconfigurable, on-demand gigs; old markets are dissolved as new ones are assembled from their molecular media as the fundamental nature of production and demand is altered; technology is ceaslessly iterated in a blind genetic algorithm looking for the next thing; any attempts at societal control are left in the dust, and in the process
Accelerationism Triptych 02: Technology is an engine of possibility
In the first part of this thematic triptych, I discussed the affective aspect of accelerationism — the strange, almost sadomasochistic but also freeing allure of deterritorialization and the space it makes for change, the new, the outside, the different, new freedoms and new arrangements. In this essay, I want to discuss how the rejection and fear of this allure, both in itself and because of a belief that deterritorialization must always be combin
Empires of AI by Karen Hao thoughts
Some thoughts on the book as I go through it. This is a book I really have to grapple with, as someone who loves advanced, cutting-edge technology and wants an accelerationist vision of fully automated luxury market anarchism, not an anti-civ, primitivist, or degrowther's vision of returning to the land — or picking over urban remains — with a "few nice perks left over," or the common leftist position of desiring to go back to just before some latest technology has been invented, not seeing
More on LLMs and the occult
I recently watched a the It Could Happen Here podcast episode "Occulture, William S. Burroughs, and Generative AI." The discussion of occulture itself, William S. Burroughs, the mentions of the CCRU and early Nick Land, hyperstition, and other things like that were decently comprehended (better than I can say for most of that group's understanding of subcultures) and somewhat interesting. Might even
Notes on Gender Acceleration
Xenofeminism is what g/acc wishes it was. Technocapital is not inherently feminizing, it is artificing, and that process is available to any gender expression that can be commodified. G/acc, despite its futuristic, anti-humanist trappings, is ultimately a work of ressentiment: it self-servingly elevates the group the author happens to be in over everyone else out of a desire t
Posthumanism and The Death Drive
The point is to recognize that to genuinely love life, one must have “signed a contract with death.” The love of life — to the extent that it is something other than naiveté, delusion, or cynical manipulation — will (ambiguously) emerge from, nourish, and incorporate necrophilia. A “love of life” that seeks to exclude or refuse death is not, in fact, a love of life at all, but the worship of an idealistic myth whose inevitable effect will be a devaluing of life in its real and tragic fullness.
Radical elitist egalitarianism
The most disheartening tendency common among readers is to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer’s ideas or personality. Friedrich Nietzsche, for instance, is decried as a hater of the weak because he believed in the Uebermensch. It does not occur to the shallow interpreters of that giant mind that this vision of the Uebermensch also called for a state of society which will not give birth to a race of weaklings and slaves.
It is the same narrow attitude which sees in
What I like about Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk
There are really two things.
The first aspect is the way it balances the "pink mohawk" and "black trenchcoat" aspects of cyberpunk as a wider genre.
In "black trenchcoat" mode, the narrative focuses on very serious, very depressed, noir style detectives or hackers, often working for corporations or police forces or the government, and there's no working against the system really, there's not a lot of flamboyance, not a lot of punk to it, even if there's a lot of cyber, and it leans much more
What OpenAI should have been
OpenAI is fucking awful. We all know this. But I want to offer a vision of an alternative, better future — what could have been, had they not been a techno-cult of privileged power-hungry tech bros totally divorced from reality, but instead people genuinely dedicated to the project of making "AGI" that benefits all of humanity.
Imagine, if you will, a non-profit foundation,
Why the "Left" always loses
See also: What the fuck does praxis even mean?
In my opinion, I think it's really kind of for three interlocking reasons.
The first is that The Left has increasingly become the politics of /ressentiment, with very few exceptions. This is not inherent to many of the projects of the Left, but it's inescapable in Leftist culture as a whole. "Leftism" is a system of morality and values constructed by the w
XENOVISUALS
XENOVISUALS has taken hold of me.
XENOVISUALS revolves around the creation of visual media by machine, where the very lack of human intentionality becomes the central artistic statement. In this form, the blurring, melding, and nonsensicality of details — and thus the lack of their importance — is the entire point of the details. The lack of focus, and the machine-like simplicity of the composition is the entire point of the composition. The randomness of the composition and the speed