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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 ... -
Xenogender Accelerationism
The concept of a gender accelerationism is powerful and worth exploring; however, the movement that has appropriated that name and theoretical line fails to adequately live up to the promise of the idea of thinking gender and acceleration together. The /Gender Acceleration: A Blackpaper/, which many modern unconditional accelerationists seem to view it as a fellow traveler, a very important paper, and possibly correct—a significant jumping-off point, is the primary entry point to g/acc and as ... -
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Accelerationism Triptych 03: What the fuck does praxis even mean?
What the fuck does praxis even mean. What the fuck does it even accomplish. Fucking nothing. If you work at a soup kitchen or a Food Not Bombs at least you can say you fucking fed people, but it's not like even that really makes a lick of difference to you or them in the long run — their life is, what, slightly fucking nicer for a moment? But mostly the same, because you're not fixing any root cause for them. You're feeding a man a fish, not getting him a place to fish and a fishing rod to do ... -
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 of its... -
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 weak, the oppressed, the disabled, and the marginalized, in order to define themselves as good i... -
Marx and the Austrian School
Land didn't just pull from continental philosophy, however. Part of what made his work so unique is the way he synthesized Marx's descriptions of capital's operating principles and internal logic --- freed from Marx's angry, outraged moralism --- with the Austrian School of Economics' economic insights --- symmetrically freed from their ideological commitment to pretending that the outcomes of capital must always be positive for the humans trapped within the system. The only other thinker that I... -
Lyotard
Then Lyotard comes along with Libidinal Economy and introduces libidinal materialism --- which early Land explicitly called himself, by the way. He's interested in completely erasing the top-down, condescending leftist idea that "no one can really want this shit capital is throwing at them; this has to all be false consciousness, and we've gotta fix everyone, returning them to a more natural precapitalist mode of desiring." He defends the idea that we really do enjoy the shit capital is giving u... -
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 ... -
The fascination of Nick Land: a Landian accelerationism primer
"Mad black Deleuzean" is how Ray Brassier described Nick Land once, and it strikes at the heart of exactly why he's so interesting. Haven't dived into Land yet? Kind of avoided him? That's fair. New Land is a boring lolcow --- the Dark Enlightenment guy who ended up a Nixonian geriatric whining about "grievance-mongers" and immigrants --- but no, I'm talking about old Land. Pre Dark Enlightenment fascist turn. Of the Fanged Noumena and CCRU (Cybernetic culture research unit, the writings of whic... -
Re-accelerationism
Recently came across a reference to a blog post from Nick Land's neoreactionary era blog, Xenosystems, which sounded interesting, so I went and found it in Xenosystems Fragments (well, a free PDF copy I found thereof online; no need to fund whatever ghoulish press would actually publish such a thing). I'll reproduce it here. Re-AccelerationismIs there a word for an ‘argument’ so soggily insubstantial that it has to be scooped into a pair of scare-quotes to be apprehended, even in its self-di... -
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 ... -
Notes on Gender Acceleration
Xenofeminism is what g/acc wishes it was. Technocapital is not inherently feminizing, it is artificing, and that process is available to any gender expression that can be commodified. G/acc, despite its futuristic, anti-humanist trappings, is ultimately a work of ressentiment: it self-servingly elevates the group the author happens to be in over everyone else out of a desire to simply invert the existing hierarchy (good/evil becomes evil/good; masculine/feminine becomes feminine/masculine) as an... -
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 be worth a listen, although it's quite thinly sketched out. So I was somewhat hopeful when they g... -
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 hea... -
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 tragi... -
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 combined with exploitative capitalistic reterritoria... -
Bataille
Then there's Bataille. Interestingly, Land's first and only published book when he was still associated with academic philosophy was /The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism/, which was the first English book to engage with Bataille's writings. Land draws a lot from Bataille; it could almost be said that Bataille provides the underlying motive power of Land's thought. One of the core ideas that Land draws from Bataille and uses to motivate his theories is the idea of ... -
Deleuze and Guattari
Basically, one of the key points of D&G's Anti-Oedipus is that capitalism --- through markets, commodification, alienation, abstraction, globalization, telecommunications, technology, capital, financial markets, money, etc. --- has this extremely strong decoding force (the process of breaking down established meanings, interpretations, and hierarchies), deterritorializing force (the process of detaching things from necessary concrete associations, making them infinitely reconfigurable, reassembl... -
The market is for Outsiders
I love the market. Yes, you heard me right. And more than that, I love it precisely because it is inhuman, alienated --- because it allows for functional anonymity, social and material decoupling, deterritorialization of relations of material interdependence, the destruction of all obligatory culture and values. The local supermarket doesn't care that I'm trans... All it cares about is whether I have money. It may be profitable for some surveillance capitalist corporations to know those things a... -
Better Offline with Ed Zitron
I started listening to Better Offline pretty soon after it started. I had tried Chat GPT (3.5-Turbo) once not too long ago and been singularly unimpressed, been taken in by the talk about AI's inherant energy inefficiency and "huge" global climate impact, and was mad about it, so I was looking for good criticisms of the whole bubble, and BO seemed like just the thing. I was initially a little bit put off by the title --- it seemed to indicate a sort of reactionary anti-technologism (colloquially... -
Norbert Weiner
Finally, before we get to Land's ideas themselves, we have to discuss cybernetics, the science that complexity theory, control theory, and systems engineering spilled out of in the subsequent decades. Fundamentally, it's the science of feedback loops: how do systems whose outputs feed back into its inputs, modified by extra information processing and interaction with external factors, behave over time? Once you have Marx and the Austrians' views of capitalism not as a continual motion toward som... -
The loom-maker's luddism
Software developers need a reality check. We are a trade that has spent decades feeling like we were the prime movers of progress through technological automation. Now that we've suddenly realized that we're subject to the same historical forces we applied to everyone else, we shouldn't back down. We cannot demand the benefits of the Industrial Revolution while simultaneously trying to build a software developer guild system to protect our own privileges. I see frequent statements online from de...
Tag: accelerationism
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