
Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in - benpink
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/11/accelerationism-how-a-fringe-philosophy-predicted-the-future-we-live-in
======
defen
If I were to give my own tl;dr summary of accelerationism, I would say that
they treat intelligence as the "good" of utmost value. In the accelerationist
vision of the world, intelligence is a feature of the universe, a sort of
higher-level organizing principle, and we should strive to maximize
intelligence in whatever form. Accelerationists would be perfectly content
with a world of ever more intelligent self-replicating machines taking over
the universe, without regard to human life or happiness. After all, Nick
Land's personal motto is "Coldness be my God"

Everything else is what you get when you take "maximize intelligence" to its
logical conclusion.

~~~
aerodeck
I think this is more or less correct, but I think the more important take-away
from the article is how this kind of thinking ends up getting wrapped up in
NRx and inevitably, the alt-right. Viewed from 1,000 ft, it is very easy to
coldly construe our weird political landscape as a fulfillment of this hyper-
rationalist dream: the irrationalities of the poor and uneducated are
something to be corraled by the cold and calculating. It's the sort of
thinking popular with plutocrats, since it rationalizes their actions.

Accelerationism is interesting to me insofar as it is transparent about the
fact that technology is an a-human (not in-human) force. Blind faith in the
liberational potential of technology does nothing to actually fulfill this
potential, but instead just furthers it's a-human qualities. The reference to
the California ideology is apt.

~~~
defen
> Accelerationism is interesting to me insofar as it is transparent about the
> fact that technology is an a-human (not in-human) force.

I think that's a really good, pithy way of phrasing it.

> this kind of thinking ends up getting wrapped up in NRx and inevitably, the
> alt-right.

I would say that accelerationists are very closely aligned with NRx, and only
tactically allied with the alt-right. I would say only tactically aligned with
the alt-right because they view the alt-right as "identity politics for white
people", which is fine insofar as it restricts immigration (because most of
the immigrants coming to the US come from cultures that do not value personal
liberty as highly as Anglosphere culture does; and do not have mean IQs as
high as US whites); but the NRx and accelerationist ideal is to take all (and
only) the smart people regardless of race and build a techcomm utopia.

NRx / acclerationist immigration policy would probably require scoring at
least 130 on an IQ test.

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nottorp
I really don't see what the article's accelerationism has to do with the
notion as used in Lord of Light. In spite of the Hindu religion references,
that is definitely not a philosophy/politics book.

It is Zelazny's best book in my opinion, and you can read it - it has little
to nothing to do with the Guardian's article.

~~~
WaxProlix
Absolutely agreed. This seems to be a simple case of confusing a number of
largely unrelated things just because the names given them are the same. If I
were the author, I'd be embarrassed over spending so much time and proverbial
ink over what is essentially a misunderstanding of concepts.

------
gt_
It's interesting seeing 'accelerationism' floating up to the hackernews crowd.
Unfortunately, this article misses the lasting value of the theory in the arts
where it flourishes as nothing short of an artistic movement. Accelerationism
has only indirect relations to technology, intelligence, "progress" and is NOT
to be mistaken for technological progress or "fast transhumanism" or
"irresponsible transhumanism" or singularity chit chat. If this is what you
have in mind, keep studying.

I am steeped in the circle of artists and thinkers who have been toying with
accelerationism, the most important of who are properly mentioned in the
article (Marx, Noys, Land, Deleuze and Guittari, more) but the article
ultimately misses the usefulness of the concept and waters it down into yet
another transhumanist navel gazing and further sci-fi gargling.
Accelerationism seems easiest grasped by American millenials and grey haired
leftist philosophers, in other words those with a nurtured consciousness of
mass consumer culture.

Accelerationism is an angle of marxism most at home in aesthetic studies and
pretty much nowhere else. Accelerationism usually reveals itself as a
reflexive irony (with sometimes thick nuance) in it's aesthetic applications,
related to exacerbated effects/affects of the commercial abstraction loop to
the point where commercial abstraction is not only "there" but is the material
of life experience itself. There are significant strains of culture that are
out and out "accelerationist" style. I would argue accelerationism revives the
Pop art torch in a truly Warholian manner and at contention with the desperate
and defensive current state of institutional contemporary art. Vaporwave,
post-internet, Dis Magazine, health goth, 2016 Berlin Biennale are at the
least affiliates of accelerationist art and at the most it's representatives.

------
jtmcmc
I don't think Zelazny or lord of light is largely forgotten. It's still
considered an excellent scifi book!

------
Sharlin
This essay reads weirdly like it was transported from an alternate universe
where the notion of accelerating human progress only occurred to a fringe
group of mostly right-wing thinkers. I guess it reads like what articles about
transhumanism and Kurzweil-style singularitarianism did read about fifteen
years ago...

------
Apocryphon
Another excellent piece on the ideology for the layman:

"The Darkness Before the Right" [https://theawl.com/the-darkness-before-the-
right-84e97225ac1...](https://theawl.com/the-darkness-before-the-
right-84e97225ac19)

the same author's clarifying follow-up is good too, though with a lot more
academic jargon:
[https://pmacdougald.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/accelerationism...](https://pmacdougald.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/accelerationism-
left-and-right/)

------
mannigfaltig
There is _always_ a fringe philosophy that had it right.

~~~
goatlover
Are they right in this case? I see the previous 70 years (1877-1947) as having
more fundamental change than the last 70. It's hard to top electricity,
automobiles, aircraft, penicillin, vaccinations, refrigeration, radio, tv, QM
& Relativity as fundamentally transformative. Also, two world wars
transforming the political map and doing away with the dynastic empires of the
past.

If you define the singularity as being unable to predict the future, then I
would say that period of time would have been less predictable than any other
time in human history.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Seems to me that, while QM became "understood" in that period, the transistor
was only discovered in the last year. _All_ the applications of the transistor
came in the latest 70 years.

There's also the discovery of the gene, and space travel. Those haven't
transformed daily life as much as the inventions of the previous 70 years, but
add in the transistor and it gets close...

------
gumby
Zelazny forgotten? I seriously doubt it, and Lord of Light is an extraordinary
book, though it does suffer at the end from his chronic problem in bringing a
story to a close (he's hardly alone in this affliction).

But his prose...delightful!

------
Animats
Two words: Javascript frameworks.

Now that's accelerationism.

~~~
nabla9
More like branchtionism.

1\. New technological platform emergence, 5 years.

2\. Rebuild basic tooling over 5 years.

3\. Experiment with new possibilities for another 5 years.

4\. Find out what the real improvements over previous platform were during
next 5 years and settle for them.

5\. Goto 1. With lessons learned from previous platform, but forgetting some
earlier lessons.

------
atemerev
Is there anybody here who _doesn't_ like technical progress and doesn't want
it to go faster?

We are still stuck on this little blue marble, with the entire Universe in our
telescopes (hundreds of billions of galaxies, hundreds of billions stars in
each), that we can see, but can't really visit. It almost maddens me.

If we meatbags are too fragile to travel to stars, let's build immortal AIs
who'll do it for us. I am going to die on this planet, like every other human
being. But I hope that we can create new minds and new non-carbon lifeforms,
better than us, who might be able to escape.

I guess I am an accelerationist. But isn't it a natural attitude for any
thinking mind?

~~~
ABCLAW
>Is there anybody here is who _doesn't_ like technical progress and doesn't
want it to go faster?

Sure. I am quite glad we stopped iterating on nuclear weapon designs and I am
quite fine with the state of the art not obliterating entire continents yet.
I'm also quite happy we haven't done the R&D and optimization to lower the
cost for mass producing neutron bombs too. I think you are too.

I like technical progress that ameliorates the human condition. Some of it
does. Some of it doesn't.

Talking about the idea is difficult and complicated when you drill down
beneath some trivial level, so people rarely bother, unless they, in one form
or another, abstract that complexity away.

If you do that, you're left with "progress is good!" and forget all the times
when it wasn't or the reverse. Neither position is particularly interesting.

~~~
atemerev
> we stopped iterating on nuclear weapon designs

We didn't. Los Alamos is pretty busy this time of year. So is Sarov.

> we haven't done the R&D and optimization to lower the cost for mass
> producing neutron bombs too.

We had. And also, we were smart enough to put these papers on the shelf and
not proceed with them.

Say what you want about humanity, but 70+ years without a nuclear war is
impressive, given our history. It became possible through continuous
innovation in game theory, spy games, and yes, improving the deterrents. I
think nuclear weapons will never be actually used in large-scale future wars,
like chemical weapons weren't massively used in WW2.

Progress is good. Wars are part of the progress. Wars themselves are bad,
though, so some of the progress is spent to keep wars at bay, to not interfere
with the progress.

~~~
bykovich2
"Progress is good" is an implicative tautology -- the seeming obviousness of
the statement relies on the fact that the term "progress" strongly implies
"betterness." And it is, in fact, its applicability to any state of affairs a
matter of betterness -- but betterness of very specific, and often unspoken,
types. "Technology progress" may mean "better technology" \-- but it does
/not/ necessarily mean "technology that is better for people."

~~~
atemerev
Yes, not necessarily. Progress, in my opinion, is increasing efficiency in the
modes of operation. Scaling-out. Space programs are progress. Modern warfare
is not progress, it is, at best, self-defence and status quo preservation.

I believe that intelligence rooted in biology is not the most efficient mode
of operation.

~~~
bykovich2
How do you justify that definition of progress? And how do you draw a
connection between "increasing efficiency in the modes of operation" and
"good" (or even "desirable") -- if you do?

------
elevenfist
I guess libertarianism is on its last legs if they have to give it a new name
and a fresh coat of paint. The bullshit is still simplistic, as always.

------
mixedCase
TL;DR: It's just communism by another name.

~~~
WaxProlix
Not quite what the article talks about, but Accelerationism in
communist/anarchist thought is the notion that you either permit capitalism to
go off the rails without hindering it or even encourage it actively. The goal
is to "show it for what it really is" and make things so unpalatable that a
worker uprising is inevitable (or at least more likely).

So in that view, an accelerationist could be a socialist who opposes things
like minimum wage, universal health care, privacy rights legislation, etc.

~~~
ue_
I am a Socialist myself and I often talk with people who are accelerationists;
I am divided on the issue personally. Accelerationism in the Communist sphere
tends to align itself with policies against working within the democratic
system to improve conditions, as you noticed even to reject social democratic
policies. The other argument for this from their point of view is that it
would encourage complacency of the workers to be having these social
democratic policies, as some view Keynesianism did to the Western capitalist
nations.

An interesting point here is about Marx himself; he wrote:

"Moreover, the protectionist system is nothing but a means of establishing
large-scale industry in any given country, that is to say, of making it
dependent upon the world market, and from the moment that dependence upon the
world market is established, there is already more or less dependence upon
free trade. Besides this, the protective system helps to develop free
competition within a country. Hence we see that in countries where the
bourgeoisie is beginning to make itself felt as a class, in Germany for
example, it makes great efforts to obtain protective duties. They serve the
bourgeoisie as weapons against feudalism and absolute government, as a means
for the concentration of its own powers and for the realization of free trade
within the same country.

"But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, _while the
free trade system is destructive_. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes
the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In
a word, the _free trade system hastens the social revolution_. It is in this
revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade."
(Emphasis mine)

~~~
dragonwriter
The problem with that kind of acceleration is that it assumes that the problem
with establishing change is getting people to believe that their life sucks.
But that's not the problem, the problem is convincing people that action for
change can make things better. Concrete victories, starting small, can do
that; letting things get worse doesn't.

Capitalism replaced feudalism because the bourgeoisie took power, one small
victory at a time, from the feudal nobility.

If a system in which the working classes take power from the capitalists is to
replace capitalism—and the modern mixed economy may be a transitional form on
the route to such a system, or might just be a diversion—then it's going to be
the same way.

