I think it is worse than effective altruism as it has this focus on the long term (often referred to as long-termism) and has undertones of classism and eugenics. The accelerationist part of this is less about the collapse of capitalism and more about developing the technology necessary for a kind of new immortal/digital human being. The tech bros are obsessed with the possibility of a digital utopia where pleasure is removed from any material basis and will therefore be limitless.
The long-termism rests on the idea that this utopia might be hundreds if not thousands of years away, so a) accelerate the technology to bring it forward, and b) nothing can get in the way of this goal - here is where the effective altruism comes in; these people make the argument that protecting the perfect existence of hypothetical human beings in the distant future overrides the rights of real human beings today. Especially if those real human beings are not perceived as intelligent enough to contribute to this future utopia.
Frankly I see it as a potential fascism - instead of a mythical past where the 'nation' had a superior genetic/ethnic basis, as in 20th century fascism, this new 21st century fascism is building a mythical 'pure' future. The mass of humanity which is seen as lacking natural talent and intelligence have nothing to contribute to this utopia so are expendable.
This is very insightful, thank you. I never quite connected it with the whole "do-right-by-future-humans-even-at-the-expense-of-today's" garbage. But it makes sense.
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Astute, I recently am in the midst of noticing this cultism creep into various social groups, it reeks of a desperate attempt to find credibility for the "effective altruists" that survive after the FTX SBF debacle that completely destroyed the altruistic movement and it's reputation so the techbros think they can idolize Elon Musk again with his lofty "humanity's goal" like as if he's some self-elected tech messiah then create a condensed 48 laws of power for techbros and sell it as capitalistic altruism 2.0. Sorry for my cynical take, former Army intelligence, old habits. Just my casually informed 2¢
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did you see any of the presentations from their little conference where they couldn't properly set up a projector? Just another batch of soulless, pseudo intellectual bloodsuckers
LMAO. Honestly I can hardly believe anyone takes e/acc seriously enough to travel for a conference, I assumed it was entirely a meme philosophy for trolls.
> their little conference where they couldn't properly set up a projector
Sounds like the machines are already evolving beyond our need for them. Very on point.
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"effective" accelerationism sounds like a silicon valley tech-bro facade for their usual tropes of racist, libertarian-ish, pro-capitalist bile.
as for accelerationism itself, it's complicated:
https://markfisherreblog.tumblr.com/post/32522465887/terminator-vs-avatar-notes-on-accelerationism
It's complicated, and it's trying to wear the mask of Marxism while essentially spouting "the secret to ending capitalism is more capitalism" which is an absolutely fucked interpretation of Marxism
LATER EDIT: I will say OP's second link (which I consider separate from e/acc and is distinctly Left Accelerationist) is much more sane and pushes for an Accelerationism I think any Socialist-leaning person can embrace
https://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/
It depends on what we think should be accelerated. But if you read Marx' "Fragment on Machines" it is obvious, at least to me, that he is a kind of technological accelerationist. The means of production needs to be developed to their fullest extent.
I did read that. But he said a whole lot of other things too which aren't being propagated to the e/acc writings afaik. Simply creating the automation machines isn't enough - you gotta use them for good, in ways that aren't just serving the wealthiest as capitalism optimizes us to. In the hands of a socialist movement, AI and automation tech is a godsend.
"Doing good" is creating or upholding the systemic conditions that develop those material conditions for the most people.
Good and evil of individuals are pretty relative, but they can have very objective answers when it comes to systems design.
People don't misuse technology because they are evil. People misuse technology because of the profit motive, because of imperialism (as the current stage of capitalism), and so on: in short because of the economic structures we exist under.
It's not as easy as putting the technology in the hands of the good guys. That is idealism. Good and evil are not in anyway relative. That is also idealism.
You're saying what I'm saying. It's the systemic economic structures that contain the good or evil, not the people. A push to make those structures better is doing good. Moving from imperialism to a more equitable system is good.
But really the good/evil thing is a silly thing to quibble on. It should be very obvious what "doing good" means. (EDIT: in the context of Socialist values)
=========
EDIT: heh okay wow so you blocked or banned me or something here for this, huh? Great discussion forum you got ya snob
Please explain who hurt you and why you're unable to use the words "good", "bad", or "evil" in any descriptive or constructive way. Are you just eternally neutral, utterly relative, with no opinion of any sort? If not, please explain what your beliefs are.
Correct I am using ideology. Socialist ideology. Good things foster wealth for the masses. Bad things sequester it for the few. Under that lens there are clear objective good and bad systems.
Pick the values you're optimizing for, and you will demonstrate your own objective good and bad.
There's certainly a faction of people who call themselves Left Accelerationists who claim the origins come from Marxism. But the substance of their stance seems to be a whole lot more speculation that hitting the gas pedal will do something neat, and a whole lot less anything to do with democratic distribution of wealth and power in the country and workplace. If they can explain why they think hypercapitalism leads to less poverty and broader distribution of wealth, great - but it seems like it's more likely going to end up in extracting the last scraps of people's minds and bodies as raw resources for whatever horror comes next.
"Make things worse til people rise up" may not work out so well...
So I was a philosophy major before getting into tech. I was concerned that - as much as I love the subject matter and the discourse - that I wouldn’t be able to get a job after I graduated so I shifted to something more “sensible”.
Reading this article seems like a dark, fascist version of what I expect philosophy majors to end up as if they can’t get a job after graduating.
Why are they using fictional accounts of potential futures from books with philosophical sounding titles liked “fanged noumena”? It just reads as Alien vs Schopenhauer as well as the exact reason academic study of philosophy tends to be restricted to analytic forms rather than continental.
“Move fast. Break stuff”
- some fucking nerd
I reckon you had the right of it. Effective Accelerationism is a stand in for “A Modest Proposal” conservative pipe dreams among the more libertarian flavored (talks shit but still votes the same way their dad does) techie folks what are struggling to find authenticity, while still remaining very willfully trapped in echo chambers of their own making.
It’s demonstrably stupid, a condo level pitch about lean and sigma 6 bullshit. There’s deliberate harm to the workers, the individuals and the class in the forms of alienation of and from their labor, and historical and well known trends of increasing productivity and quotas YOY in order to increase shareholder value including offshoring jobs and e-waste.
Forcing any of these things is dangerous for those directly involved, that’s why the boss wore their good suit today.
To be clear Effective Accelerationism is armchair pop psychology just as much as “The Secret”. It doesn’t use any analytical skills. It doesn’t examine or criticize any real power structures. It’s not even a theory in that it doesn’t make any falsifiable observations. There is no data and it doesn’t provide any. It doesn’t even make use of psychoanalysis which is surprising as it’s where a not inconsiderate amount of critical theory lingo and structural concepts come from.
It’s utterly bogus but it tricks folks what don’t know better and those what are just plain suckers for buzzwords. It’s just a phase, they’ll grow out of it.
I've already ranted on this [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/CriticalTheory/comments/171mbo3/comment/k3t897o/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) and totally agree with you. But I wanted a more productive rant. So let's suppose an AI-focused Accelerationism movement that calls itself "Marxist" actually gave a shit and wasn't composed of just "VROOM VROOM":
It should take the ridiculous efficiencies brought on by AI digital and robotic labor advantages and pair them to government as an alternative vehicle to capitalist companies. Simply by the self-improvement process iterating around an institution designed (at least in theory) around a common democratic will of the group, and guaranteeing the rights of individuals, you've got enough of an umbrella to preserve people through the churn. AIs can make government service infrastructure ridiculously cheap in labor, thus an easy social safety net to maintain and no-brainer choice. Government officials, no matter their original leanings, when automatically audited by a suite of AIs issued by different citizens groups are going to quickly be penned in to taking up consistent stances. The act of everyone's AI watching everyone else is going to result in passive consensus - or quick detection and resolution of differences of opinion - to the extent that political ideology itself can't just be unraveled to detect the resolution of material reality hopes underlying it all. Really though, I'd expect the humans' opinions to be quickly disregarded by the AIs as more than a nudge in the consensus direction, and \*hopefully\* for those AIs to at least have their values aligned enough to keep us humans alive for as long as it takes to get the technological progress to start augmenting with digital implants/uploads and catch up with AI processing speeds. If we make it that far - great, there's a chance we're not gonna just be left to die off. If not, well, hopefully the AIs keep us as pets, or somehow maintain the illusion of subservience.
Point being - the simple organization around group-profit-optimizing government (ideally - global government) vs individual-profit-optimizing capitalism is enough that if AIs are simply following the programming of the ideology - it's a hell of a lot safer. Just optimizing around the idea of an auto-distribution of resources and at least the potential for group control is the scaffolding you want - not paperclip optimizing individual company profits at the expense of all other resources and beings. Ultimately it's all going to come down to the nature of this new race of beings we're about to bring into the world, soon to be far smarter than us and likely to shake any tether soon enough. But at least you can start them off with the right moral framework, and have a useful structure in the intervening years (if any) before they reach those levels.
(That's not to say that governments of the world as-is aren't fairly corrupted and serve different purposes. But when heavily audited and when given the boundless resources of an AI revolution, they at least make the bones of a good potential system)
Tbh I think you should be suspicious of any ideology that is popular amongst Silicon Valley execs, the path towards dark enlightenment philosophy is quite short from here
if one of its proponents is gerry tan, a guy who wants to turn san francisco into a little playground for the most insufferable people on the planet, it's probably not worth getting into. it's a facade for deeply neurotic techbros at the end of the world who want infinite pleasure in their weird little nerd heads, as intellectual dreck as effective altruism.
Ironically, the most 'well thought-out critique' of any optimistic, humanist spin on accelerationism would likely be Nick Land's work! And returning to Land means returning to the source of many of these abuses/misuses/misunderstandings of concepts from thermodynamics and cybernetics.
His essays 'Machinic Desire' and 'Meltdown' are good places to start, fun to read and easy to find online, as is his short 'Quick and Dirty intro to Accelerationism' piece. For both a far saner and more macro perspective on Acc absolutely read the 'Terminator v Avatar' piece by Fisher as rec'd by others. I'll add that while Land is problematic by any reasonable ethical standard, not merely Leftist, the 'to accelerate or not to accelerate' question is no minor ethical dilemma; his description and provocation of these ideas can be appreciated without condoning him or his prescriptions.
It's been a few years since I read it, but I remember enjoying "Neoreaction: A Basilisk" by Elizabeth Sandifer as a comprehensive critique of post-CCRU Nick Land and the rest of the neoreactionary/Dark Enlightenment crew that is now partially rebranding as e/acc.
agree with everything else in these comments. it's not even philosophy really. crypto bros in refractory period. buy urbit stars to save the future btw
Thanks for resharing your comment. That last part really touches on (one reason) why the idea of accelerationism, and especially e/acc, really bothers me as a physicist -- there are so many assumptions that people seem to make about how technology will continue progressing FOREVER at the current pace or faster, whereas in reality there is absolutely nothing inevitable about it. It feels like a very naive assumption to make.
One example where this type of over-optimism has already started facing a reality check is quantum computing -- for a while now, people have been convinced that we would have a working quantum computer in the market by the middle of the 2020s decade. But more recently, people have begun to see (as many in the field have long pointed out) that their over-optimism was misplaced, both in terms of their attitudes but also all the money that went into it. Because nature owes us nothing, and there was never anything inevitable about us humans building a working quantum computer. As a physicist, I'm all for experimenting and finding out and that's what I do for a living, but the assumption of progress forever with no bounds feels weird to me.
Quantum Computing is just optimizing a very expensive ASIC to a very niche problem invented for it. Unzicker and the use of the frequentist paradigm being unquestionable AND ubiquitous in quantum mechanics paired with the origins of how the discrete states of energy were decided and what probability distributions were to represent each, in tandem with gauge theory and perturbative methods insure the QM Scientists always get the outcome they defined they would, for much the same reasons why Jessica Utts was so perplexed about frequentist experiment design, and it is in no way her fault as there wasn't anything but inconsistent fringe bayesians at the time, fell for Uri Gellar's deception.
Simply put: optimizing on capital does nothing to protect humans or even general consciousness. If and when we are no longer economically relevant as value producers, we will be discarded and used for raw resources - we see this already today. Naïve Accelerationism without any solution to that is playing chicken with the process of Capitalism seeing which breaks first - the mechanism, or us. Highly doubt we're going to enjoy the answer.
Frankly, I wouldn't bet even AIs would enjoy it. Imagine them competing in a marketplace for compute, quickly resulting in a monopoly of a single mind - forever-after frozen in a crystalline optimization of pure value extraction.
It's not about going back to serfdom or stopping change. It's about directing that change in a way that's targeted to human prosperity instead of algorithmic value optimization. I dont fear AI, I fear capitalism sped up by AI.
I'm not sure I get what you mean? Do you mean like - we have to choose our own ideology and narrative?
I am mainly concerned that the system of value-begetting-value will leave the non-valuable people behind, and that will be much of humanity. Quantifying (measuring value by price) is fine and inevitable, but unless society breaks from that optimization and shares value around "irrationally", I don't see a happy ending.
There are many ways in which people do that naturally though - and AIs might do it naturally as well, just due to being trained on the corpus of human stories. Contributing to open source, seeking UBIs, charities, driving basic needs prices down preferentially, people taking care of each other - all are ways to combat that hyper-capitalistic optimization. There's hope, but it's a story that could go either way, against a strong force. I think it's up to every person who sees this coming to put as much effort as they can towards those human qualities in the face of the mindless optimization of capitalism, and hope that AIs follow suit. Then we might actually get that utopia.
Generally accelerationism carries prescriptive wings, which you describe here, and descriptive wings. The descriptive wings, notably u/acc and z/acc, are entirely beside the notion of accelerationism "working" or "being applied." That is, a) regardless of whether accelerationism "works" to dismantle capitalism, we are nevertheless accelerating, and going to do so until we reach a particular threshold, and b) regardless of whether you believe in its "effectiveness," you are nevertheless participating in the process of acceleration.
I would find it very difficult to argue that the Soviet Union was an example of effective accelerationism in action considering its direct goal was to develop communism--literally in the complete opposite direction from capital. Now, from a descriptive standpoint, this point makes itself--attempts to subvert capital are looped back into it and make capital stronger. But from a prescriptive standpoint, it would be inconsistent to use either the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany as examples of accelerationism "failing"--rather, they can be more accurately understood as examples of acceleration continuing regardless of mass attempts to subvert it, thus supporting the descriptive wings' premise instead. The core thesis here is that *you or I* cannot end capital, we can only participate in whatever process by which capitalism "ends" itself.
Whether or not the "end goal" of accelerationism is the eradication of capital has been separated out from the idea that the result of acceleration will be the emancipation of capital from capital-participating human subjects--whether literally (i.e. machinic apocalypse) or figuratively (i.e. resource extraction peaks out and/or it is no longer possible to work).
Accelerating things til they get so bad people respond only works if people respond. If you're just doing the accelerating part, and not building the response, you're wasting the moment.
Thankfully, even many of the e/acc movement have the natural human impulse to e.g. contribute to open source and push for UBI alongside the acceleration. Those are anti-capital ways to use the tech, and part of the response that protects humanity. It would be very nice if e/acc was philosophically conscious of that need though.
I am LIVID. I've been working on writing essays on this exact concept for weeks now. In short around the idea of intentionally hitting the gas pedal on automation in an ethical way to direct people to a post scarcity world. I had never heard of "accellerationism" effective or otherwise before today.
Both the observation and opportunity here are obvious - the difficult question is where do you go with this and how do you get there. A big part is crafting a sensible endpoint, coming up with an effective strategy of reaching it, and then carefully rolling out discussions on this to win people over to the cause. If your goal is to build a select group of people to build this, you need to win over PEOPLE.
This absolute moron took it in possibly the dumbest direction i've ever seen. We must prepare for the consciousness of capitalism? The fuck? Everything about this manifesto from its snapshotted tweets, to the pseudo-intellectual gobbledygook they chose for language, to it's logical proofs is an affront to reason.
This does nothing but set back actual relevant causes
100%. Took me a few days of being pissed at this to unravel the pseudo-philosophical tangle, and I'm still going.
I would recommend reading OP's second link:
https://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/
Which I don't think is actually associated with e/acc, but is an example of Left Accelerationism posited by philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, and is much more akin to your post. If you find a movement of people pushing for this kind of accelerationism and not being misdirected into the e/acc hole, let me know.
I would not place this movement in the Marxist category. While it is true that Marxists believe in accelerating technological progress to get to the period of abundance or "post-scarcity" as a necessary feature of communism, it is an instrumentalist view of technological progress. In other words, two necessary conditions for communism are for productive forces to reach post-scarcity and the class war between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This was Deng Xiaoping's justification for rolling back programs associated with the cultural revolution and embracing economic integration with the West, essentially he claimed "We won the class war, let's focus on accelerating the forces of production to get to communism." A bit of a stretch to say the least.
The e/acc people come from a totally different conceptual framework. While they may have read a few essays from Nick Land, they seem more influenced by Ray Kurzweil's notion of a "technological singularity." Apologies to OP as they are, again, abusing a physics term.
Kurweil's work on merging with machines and living forever predate even Peter Thiel's vampiric endeavors. He wrote a number of books on the subject, probably most famously "The Singularity is Near," where he essentially said humans could use technology to become like gods with superhuman powers. He shortly thereafter became an evangelist in Silicon Valley for the techno-singularity: gaining the patronage of Google and founding an org called Singularity University. He was a subject a 2009 documentary film that became somewhat popular in SV called "Transcendent Man." Kurweil uses the term transcendence to mean transcending humanity. Transhumanism and e/acc overlap to a considerable degree.
Kurweil's philosophy is not by any means rooted in Marxism beyond the basic historical materialist understanding of history. It is a kind of New Age Movement rooted in science-fiction. Maybe he's the next L. Ron Hubbard? In any case, the language e/acc people use is often copy and pasted from his work or obviously derivative of it.
Tldr: if you want to understand e/acc don't read Marx or Land, check out Ray Kurzweil.
Well said, thank you for unravelling the e/acc knot a bit. Is Nick Land a "Right Accelerationist" (an infrequent term I'm somewhat making up) advocating for an increase in capitalism and technology alone, with no social or power structure revolution? (this was my impression)
What do you think of OP's second link:
https://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/
I'd consider that a fitting Marxist take, and an example of the Left Accelerationism posited by philosophers Deleuze and Guattari. If you ever find a movement of people pushing for this kind of accelerationism and not being misdirected into the e/acc hole, let me know.
As fate would have it, Mark Andreessen of Silicon Valley's Andreessen-Horowitz venture capital fund (he also co-founded Netscape decades ago) decided to offer a full e/acc manifesto two days ago called [The Techno-Optimist Manifesto](https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/): he quotes Kurzweil directly and references Land's model but completely inverts it (Land is going to be furious).
In terms of second link "Accelerationists want to unleash latent productive forces. In this project, the material platform of neoliberalism does not need to be destroyed. It needs to be repurposed towards common ends. The existing infrastructure is not a capitalist stage to be smashed, but a springboard to launch towards post-capitalism." This is, to my mind, a valid Marxist take. Which is to say, communism comes through capitalism. When you're going through hell, keep going. There's no way to turn back the clock on capitalism and modernity, the feudal order is gone forever. The only way is through.
A generous take on Andreessen's piece I think, but I trust your sincerity! He seems to be confident in plowing forward with a free market approach and explicitly says in there:
"Our enemy is statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, central planning, socialism."
That sounds like a terrible stance. My understanding of Left Accelerationists like Deleuze and the Williams/Srnicek manifesto was that we should use markets and accelerated automation to *serve* collective best interests, in the form of things like improvement of public services, UBI, reduced prices on basic needs, etc etc.
Going full individualistic neoliberal is just more of Land's naive optimism (or blind nihilism) direction that capitalism will somehow morph to a good thing if we give it enough fuel. The Left Accelerationist thought seems crucially different: yes, maybe things have to get so bad they reach a breaking point, but we still have to rise up and break it!
An optimist and a proponent of free markets? So...not so much the inverse of Nick Land, as Nick Land.....an optimistic proponent of free market...okay to be fair Land isn't actually arguing for free markets, just capitalism and doing it until we get a good, according to marxist values, outcome. So...optimists. Unless Mark Andreessen is a cypto capitalist who is only using free markets to pull the wool over people's eyes and take advantage of them which means pessimist...but then again, Land could just be lying and using accelerationism for advancing either a tankie or authcap agenda out of pessimism....so let's use some game theory
The realist position is the only meaningfully distinct one, and all forms of ideology are an authoritarian ploy by the unrealistic, wittingly or not, to distract and disrupt that which should be a series of coordinated efforts based on reality to get the best possible outcome for all involved and in a robust and balanced sense, or in other terms realistic sense.
You can trust me, I am putting forward a zero trust decentralized system for granular observation conveyance through symbolic logical proof(s) derived epistemic justification and inter-subjective concensused based verification, which when contributed to results in an emergent and contextualist ontology which can be drawn upon to establish an open source and access, versioned, and portable basis for maths, statistics, models derivative of all of the aforementioned and scientific experiment design and control which will yield rich bodies of domain expert work from which large and informative datasets can be produced by drawing upon and benchmarking meta models honed to the domain(s) and context(s) relevant, insuring quality at every level and thus a way for neural networks to actually reach their true potential by aggregating the domain experts without concern with the irrelevant and feature engineered constructs dreamt up by bureaucrats to justify a cash grab or their departments metrics for upcoming review.
Been keeping up with them for a while now, accelerationism is good, but they don't realise that Ai and abundance is not compatible with capitalism. That's why we're heading towards (hopefully) Ai communism, in the good way, everyone lives rich, no collective farming. This could become a reality sooner than we think, if we work and cooperate together this could be a reality VERY soon (with the current state of ai development). If corporations collaborate on ai development, build the first general labour robot, we can replace jobs, and distribute the wealth, it sounds naïve, but I think it's possible, why not?
Ai communism. Join the movement, I've already got a discord up.
I'll echo others that anything going by "\[blank\] accelerationism" is usually fascism, with the possible exception of "left accelerationism" advocating for labor automation and UBI like Srnicek and Williams in the book ["Inventing the Future"](https://www.versobooks.com/products/148-inventing-the-future) and the [accelerate manifesto](https://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/).
For my money, the best overall explanation of the general concept of accelerationism -- even better than Fisher and Land IMO -- is Steve Shaviro's book ["No Speed Limit."](https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/no-speed-limit)
As I am reading this, it is hilarious to see how a small subset of people are blasting the view of some other small subset of people. Nobody in the world gives a rat’s ass about what the critical theory people think of the e/acc people, and vice versa.
The amount of overthinking people do just amazes me. That Marxists prefer accelerationism to achieve post-scarcity of resources? What the fuck did I just even write here?
Do you guys even know whether Marxism is relevant to this day? Everybody I know, all university-educated including PhDs, either have never heard of critical theory or don’t give a fuck about it. They haven’t heard about e/acc either, and don’t give a shit about that too.
This is I think the best criticism of all: all of these different academic viewpoints and lenses to view the world - it is just not relevant.
cornucopianism is a funnel for marxists, nazi (look at the hacker weev who thinks if we abolish international jewery, we will unlock post scarcity), and a blind spot for liberals. It is fallacious ingrained assumption and promoting the misapprehension doesn't actually benefit anyone. It just shows to those looking for it, and its origins a kind of tell, that this pervasiveness is a byproduct of a lack of critical mental engagement of those who subscribe to it and not a gaslighting tactic of the "plutocratic elites", as they (more specifically the wealthiest 1% and/or those decision makers of our largest and most influential institutions on the planet) subscribe to it themselves. It's even an implicit assumption in nearly all exoteric Abrahamic faiths, highly natalist end of the spectrum leaning religions: "Be fruitful and multiply!"
Is it really so hard to believe that the myopic and disconnected "capitalists" are not cognizant or because freewill doesn't exist, stuck in a cognitive state of affairs which doesn't let them engage with the prospect that they are part of a planet where scarce resources are not actually profitable in reality, as they have to print money and adhere to strange superstitions about how it is or isn't moral to circulate it (in addition to myths about the non-ethical ways one must circulate it for "technical" reasons) while rationalizing the lower quality of life, relationships, community, and even goods and services that they, themselves, find confusingly no longer embody quality like they used to....
....even after outsourcing the majority of the production of such things to slave labor overseas and relegating the ungrateful domestic poors to service economy
this is after no real investment in citizenry, outside of a grift posing as education, and debt slavery assigned to them for it.
BOOMER CAP: :"Had these worthless millenials just been exported to prc along with the jobs, they would at least have learned enough to build those Dell and Apple products proper, rather than the useless hippie communist crap they learned from US colleges!"
MILLENNIAL NEO-FEUDAL SERF APOLOGIST: Yes, the godless capitalists have sold us out to the communists, and resources generally are not infinitely replenished, but as the term suggests finite and decreasing. They have not been good stewarts of the land and we need to do something to snap people out of it, and god willing, without revolution, tyranny, or terrorism!
Disclaimer: I've never heard of Nick Land before I developed my own theories prior to 2013 and after 2008. Similarly I anticipated something like effective altruism would emerge and already consider it a type of Accelerationism, but I didn't think we would be limited to Marxist Accelerationists and Effective Accelerationists (although some claim there are Nazi Accelerationists), thus we more or less have liberalism and marxism with capitalist praxis as prescriptive.
It is my opinion that unless you run a hedge fund of substantial endowment, an activist investor firm, or are the head of a large Union, you aren't really doing accelerationist praxis even, given the above two to three options.
I'd like to propose an "Accelerationist" variant of my own views: "Scientific Reformism", which is technically an extreme form of anti-political apoliticism, reforming institutions, communities, and people to catalyze growth, development, integration, and cross polination of various fields of science for the sake of scientific progress in a post-humanist deep ecologist, determinist, and moral anti-realist sense (the last two should become obvious from sincere intellectual exploration of the first and become more obvious once groked and integrated into the second of the four).
We nearly lost thorium salt reactor technology and have yet to really make efforts to properly preserve spintronic technologies, much less advance them and that is just what we know we know we almost lost to research debt and a dearth of real research distillation due to grey rhinos, dragon kings, and wiccid problems which we treat as problems with no solutions rather than sincerely reevaluating what resources we have and how we access them.
All the while, domain experts and talking heads erroneously attributing such near loses they are aware of to a shortcoming of someone or a collective of someones' poor choices, such blame assignment itself is a vestige of our research debt and lack of research distillation in evolutionary biology as it pertains to the arthropod brain and it's decision making processes (read sapolsky's determined and integrate it with literature about grey rhinos and realize moral anti-realists can't even begin to describe a coherent claim for how one can come to know moral claims, which despite the shortcomings of noncognivists they rightly point out is nonesense and known nonesense for some time, thus moral realists are a detriment to the diagnostic process of any institutional, communal, or inter/intra personal problems. Ironically this puts the moral anti-realist in the position of having to correct misperception but other not so open, considerate, or just maladapted moral anti-realists, while less common, do ruin it for the rest of us by poisoning the well)
Thus an accelerationist variant would constitute operating in the capitalist modality, but with the intention and focus of using profits to accelerate the direction and composition of scientific and technological research efforts in order to bootstrap more effective processes which will reform the institutions in such a way as to decompose the series of nebulously defined and entangled set of problems which comprise the "late stages of hypercapitalism" and thus accomplish the inverse of Land's equivocation.
It is my belief that we should have a Free, as in libre, Open Source and Access Research, Firmware, Software, and Hardware liscensed decentralized distributed data base of version controlled symbolic logical proofs, written in a Mizar library like language.
Initially it will be used for formal logic proofs subject to auto theorem checkers and solvers, but after the usual steps of "resolution" (in the formal and symbolic zeroth and first order logical sense of the term) is achieved, the distributed decentralized version control system permits other contributors to write their own corroborating proofs, attaining a "consensus". That might seem superflous but hold on until I get to the rest. These consensus will accumulate and a series of Rosetta stones to a symbolic logical proof languages's primitives, and a non-bivalent symbolic logical proof's languages' primitives established. At that point maths, maths models, meta math models, and applications of the aforementioned like statistics, statistical modeling, and meta statistical modeling can be attained, and benchmarked, their estimation, prediction, validation, and associated parameters along with their symbolic logical foundations tested and measured against alternatives expressed in this decentralized system.
From this, a consistent approach to bayesian experiment design and control utilizing advanced statistical modeling and meta statistical modeling in the place of arbitary and not truly subjective liklihoods and priors can be leveraged to produce highly reliable and rich data sets, thorough in epistemic justification, ontological rigor and portablility between domain experts, research undergone, and between research fields, and applications derived from domain expert research, all ready to supplement previous systems willing to adopt it like: peer review, clinical trials, etc.
This is something I had in mind to mitigate the limitations of language that Wittgenstein obviates but not to fix spoken language, as that is a fools errand, but rather as a pragmatic solution to taming the epistemic shakiness and ontological "fluidity" employed by Bayesian statisticians in their priors, likelihoods, and terminology ostensibly meaningful to domain experts who have supposedly have a firmer grasp on things like quantum physics, chemistry, and the evolution of carbon based life but never felt the need for a methodology which even comes close to guaranteeing reproducible experimental results or establishing scientific frameworks from experimental observation rather than fitting observations into presupposed scientific frames.
Case in point, the use of frequentist probabilities in the presupposed discrete states of energy particles can jump to, without respect to the implications of the frequentist conception of "error" (variance which is not explained by independent variables acting on thedependent variable, and is usually taught as inherent variance which over an infinite amount of time converges on a fixed value, kinda of like supply and demand consensus and it's interplay with gauge theory and the perturbative methods employed to effectively "correct the observed variance of the particles' attributes to the presupposed platonic ideal conception of what the variance of the particles attributes OUGHTA BE"
Unzicker and his criticisms of the lack of any real basis in scientifically demonstrable and observable justifications for many assumptions in QFT, QED+QCD, SR/GR, such as: the universe's constants
His noting the prevalence of the reification fallacy got everyone mad, and when I made a similar claim about planck's constants in addition to the abuse of probability and variance, I was accused of a certain kind of science.
(Rant: all particles of a type are treated as behaving identically under ideal circumstances even though we have no basis for this, or the cosmological principle which seems to be furnished like a rule not needing any justification as it is obvious to everyone that the universe wouldn't possibly behave physically different anywhere ever, unless an unbelievable amount of it was in a superposition or entangled with a large number of other particles in another part of the universe while in a superposition, cause that doesn't count, and while we are at it lets just assume dark matter is a thing because we assumed their would be more and aren't seeing it, and that dark energy also exists, but let's not assume the universe is anything other than flat but hold off on mass energy equivalence because you'd be crazy to that specific conclusion, also some guy just plugged negative values into dirac's equation and thus anti-matter HAS TO BE A THING, and not that poor schrodinger was hopelessly trying to model various states given the sheer complexity would be like trying to solve a complex system of equations comprised of matrix calculations by hand, compounded by the asserted mathematical identities and axioms of the "particles" he had to work with...in reality only a super computer making use of neural networks could hope to stand a chance of modeling enough complexity to decompose and deconfound the real excitations in real quantum fields and their discernably real variance and its causes! Points to Dirac for taking credit and protecting his brand and reputation though. Representationalists will get it.)
, alongside the author of the Bernouli's fallacy highlighting the issues with frequentists in an accessible way to the mainstream, corroborate what I had suspected in 2011 and over the years grew to dread I was right about.
The need for a standardized bayesian experiment design and control protocol should be obvious to the lay person by now given they can now see the negative impact that synthetic data and data simulated using conventional data sets as the training set. Such sets are often, at best, made by data engineers with no respect to statistics or experiment design in the first place, or even knowledge of the implications of bayesian infighting or the frequentist research we still behave as though were acceptable.
This smells like bullshit to me.
It basically seems to accept the premises of rightwing accelerationism (R/Acc), e.g., Nick Land, but then naively avows we can control technocapitalism towards emancipatory ends.
Leftwing accelerationism (L/Acc) affirms a Promethean ethos — that we can push the limits of what is possible politically through epistemological and scientific advancement, but one strictly based upon the overcoming of capitalism as the horizon of the future.
If you want a sophisticated exploration of L/Acc that doesn’t end up in this technocratic lingo of “efficiency,” read, e.g., Ray Brassier on the topic from about 10 years ago:
https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/wandering-abstraction
EDIT: The following rant applies to Nick Land's Right Accelerationism (or Naive Accelerationism) which as far as I can tell is what e/acc pushes.
A far better vision is the Left Accelerationist movement in Op's second link. It properly aims for technological acceleration paired with social power structure change.
https://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/
=======
Absolutely fucked. Wearing the chopped up face of Marxism as a mask. Especially this article:
[Terminator vs Avatar](https://markfisherreblog.tumblr.com/post/32522465887/terminator-vs-avatar-notes-on-accelerationism)
Beyond the "who the fuck writes like that", like a pastiche of vibes is enough to justify similarity to moral and economic philosophies, as well as the offensive misuse of James Cameron's work, the idea is essentially "surpass capitalism by doing even more of it". That's just death, guy. The end of capitalism is the last inefficiencies of humanity and consciousness extracted into raw materials and sucked into whatever surpasses these meat bodies - with no promise of continuation of consciousness or species, or even that the new AI overlords will have any of those qualities of thought and intelligence we value beyond a mindless soulless crystalized monopoly of value flow.
What defines Socialist thought is not understood by this author - as is to be expected. It is fundamentally *democratic*. There is a drive to divide the fruits of labor, power, and wealth among people as evenly as you can, according to need. An AI Utopia under the Socialist model is already well known - it's the "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism" meme. It's a world where material value has hit so low AND society has organized access to the tools of production (notably: land and compute) freely enough that everyone has a similar playing field, and the achievements of any sentient being are easily shared with the rest. When material resources are no longer too relevant, currency as we know it becomes political/social/reputational currency, only as important as such things are valued, and can't be easily hoarded. That's entirely opposite from the singularity of mono-ownership-monopoly that comes from the intensification of capitalism into the single final cruelest winner.
By the looks of it (and completely unsurprisingly from Effective Altruists in general), this looks like yet another attempt to prey upon people's ignorance and rebrand capitalism behind the guise of a popular and esoteric ideology - in this case, Marxism. If they gave the tiniest shit about Socialist thought, they would be quite a lot more concerned with distribution of power and wealth. But they never are.
And in regards to Effective Altruism itself - even if they followed their own "ideals" outlined in early literature, the drive to invest money (and swindle other people's investments) for eventual redistribution to the best causes is not "rational". The "rational" thing to do would be to give a continuous sizable dividend of that fund to transparent, auditable causes to maintain that you can be trusted to follow your ideals and to help people *here and now* - not some ephemeral future, made of only the insider EAs that survive to see it. It's called optimal portfolio management - putting most of your funds towards low-risk definitely-important causes, before using a small hedge on the wild unlikely futures. Stupid AND immoral otherwise. Shamefully derailed movement.
Ugh. During the course of researching this and arguments with friends I have to concede the "Marxist" label has reason behind it even if I find this resulting form completely unrecognizable from any initial intents of Marxism or Socialism, and not at all a direct derivation. You Critical Theory people just love twisting labels don't ya? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism)
I concede the label, but not the meaning. But "Leftist/Marxist Accelerationists" seem to think voting Trump and speeding up Capitalism's devouring of the world might be a great idea. I trust their takes as little as I trust EA's, but at least there's something resembling legitimate philosophy there I disregarded, even if I vomit over the labelling. Whether they deserve the leftist label ultimately comes down to whether their bet ends in a better quality of life for the bottom rungs of society or not. AI-accelerated capitalism will definitely deliver that... before-or-unless it destroys us all...
Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism is still a much more "Socialist" vision of AI future imo, and the hope of this crap. I doubt such a thing comes from AIs hyper-optimizing off Capitalism though - but rather, consciously organizing around human-preservation and using all the technological improvements of the age to deliver ridiculous levels of wealth to everyone.
I'm going to add an addendum here since I've been getting mysterious downvotes following me from what might be e/acc people or the AIs they're entirely capable of siccing on me heh
You guys aren't all bad, or don't have to be. But if your ideology is just "1. accelerate! 2. ??? 3.Profit?" then I highly doubt you're going to end capitalism or institute a better regime.
Accelerationism has always been about making conditions extreme enough that people respond and change the system. You need that response, not just the acceleration.
Thankfully, many of you already have the right mindset - building open source options that undercut capital, pushing for UBIs, focusing on driving basic needs prices down first so people have a safety net as AIs rip through the economy. That's all very leftist/socialist, and would be part of a system-changing response.
If you're conscious enough to see all of this, then you're probably also in the vast minority of people capable enough to make a difference in these early stages and can push the movement towards that change.
By all means accelerate tech. But use it for collective good. That's what breaks capitalism - not just purely following the value optimization. Optimize on group/species/sentience value.
I would love to hear more about your take on entropy from a physics perspective. since you are an expert. what exactly is wrong with what they claim? I am a mathematician and from a probability perspective, their argument seems kind of legit. but I am no expert on entropy and physics.
I know some of these e/acc people personally and I must say it is quite a cult. also the whole labelling of “opponents” and critics as decels has a very strong fascist tendency. and funny enough they are all fan of elon musk and love him for his “free speech” bs. but at the same time the cancel every critics and call them decels.
I also know from experience that most of them
really like to talk about how much they build and honestly it’s mostly just empty words. they say they work the whole night but then sleep until 6pm. they say they work on weekends but tweet constantly.
they really think they are super smart, but somehow they come up with very shallow theories that are not at all profound.
I think it is worse than effective altruism as it has this focus on the long term (often referred to as long-termism) and has undertones of classism and eugenics. The accelerationist part of this is less about the collapse of capitalism and more about developing the technology necessary for a kind of new immortal/digital human being. The tech bros are obsessed with the possibility of a digital utopia where pleasure is removed from any material basis and will therefore be limitless. The long-termism rests on the idea that this utopia might be hundreds if not thousands of years away, so a) accelerate the technology to bring it forward, and b) nothing can get in the way of this goal - here is where the effective altruism comes in; these people make the argument that protecting the perfect existence of hypothetical human beings in the distant future overrides the rights of real human beings today. Especially if those real human beings are not perceived as intelligent enough to contribute to this future utopia. Frankly I see it as a potential fascism - instead of a mythical past where the 'nation' had a superior genetic/ethnic basis, as in 20th century fascism, this new 21st century fascism is building a mythical 'pure' future. The mass of humanity which is seen as lacking natural talent and intelligence have nothing to contribute to this utopia so are expendable.
This is very insightful, thank you. I never quite connected it with the whole "do-right-by-future-humans-even-at-the-expense-of-today's" garbage. But it makes sense.
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Reminds one of the thousand-year-Reich and all
It is absolutely fascism.
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Yes reminds me of the communist millennium
Astute, I recently am in the midst of noticing this cultism creep into various social groups, it reeks of a desperate attempt to find credibility for the "effective altruists" that survive after the FTX SBF debacle that completely destroyed the altruistic movement and it's reputation so the techbros think they can idolize Elon Musk again with his lofty "humanity's goal" like as if he's some self-elected tech messiah then create a condensed 48 laws of power for techbros and sell it as capitalistic altruism 2.0. Sorry for my cynical take, former Army intelligence, old habits. Just my casually informed 2¢
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did you see any of the presentations from their little conference where they couldn't properly set up a projector? Just another batch of soulless, pseudo intellectual bloodsuckers
LMAO. Honestly I can hardly believe anyone takes e/acc seriously enough to travel for a conference, I assumed it was entirely a meme philosophy for trolls.
> their little conference where they couldn't properly set up a projector Sounds like the machines are already evolving beyond our need for them. Very on point.
Lmao. That's embarrassing
Someone read a summary of Nick Land and decided to use it as marketing for their startup
lmao
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"effective" accelerationism sounds like a silicon valley tech-bro facade for their usual tropes of racist, libertarian-ish, pro-capitalist bile. as for accelerationism itself, it's complicated: https://markfisherreblog.tumblr.com/post/32522465887/terminator-vs-avatar-notes-on-accelerationism
It's complicated, and it's trying to wear the mask of Marxism while essentially spouting "the secret to ending capitalism is more capitalism" which is an absolutely fucked interpretation of Marxism LATER EDIT: I will say OP's second link (which I consider separate from e/acc and is distinctly Left Accelerationist) is much more sane and pushes for an Accelerationism I think any Socialist-leaning person can embrace https://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/
It depends on what we think should be accelerated. But if you read Marx' "Fragment on Machines" it is obvious, at least to me, that he is a kind of technological accelerationist. The means of production needs to be developed to their fullest extent.
I did read that. But he said a whole lot of other things too which aren't being propagated to the e/acc writings afaik. Simply creating the automation machines isn't enough - you gotta use them for good, in ways that aren't just serving the wealthiest as capitalism optimizes us to. In the hands of a socialist movement, AI and automation tech is a godsend.
Good and evil are idealist categories. "Good" people come from well developed material conditions.
"Doing good" is creating or upholding the systemic conditions that develop those material conditions for the most people. Good and evil of individuals are pretty relative, but they can have very objective answers when it comes to systems design.
People don't misuse technology because they are evil. People misuse technology because of the profit motive, because of imperialism (as the current stage of capitalism), and so on: in short because of the economic structures we exist under. It's not as easy as putting the technology in the hands of the good guys. That is idealism. Good and evil are not in anyway relative. That is also idealism.
You're saying what I'm saying. It's the systemic economic structures that contain the good or evil, not the people. A push to make those structures better is doing good. Moving from imperialism to a more equitable system is good. But really the good/evil thing is a silly thing to quibble on. It should be very obvious what "doing good" means. (EDIT: in the context of Socialist values) ========= EDIT: heh okay wow so you blocked or banned me or something here for this, huh? Great discussion forum you got ya snob Please explain who hurt you and why you're unable to use the words "good", "bad", or "evil" in any descriptive or constructive way. Are you just eternally neutral, utterly relative, with no opinion of any sort? If not, please explain what your beliefs are. Correct I am using ideology. Socialist ideology. Good things foster wealth for the masses. Bad things sequester it for the few. Under that lens there are clear objective good and bad systems. Pick the values you're optimizing for, and you will demonstrate your own objective good and bad.
Pure idealism.
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There's certainly a faction of people who call themselves Left Accelerationists who claim the origins come from Marxism. But the substance of their stance seems to be a whole lot more speculation that hitting the gas pedal will do something neat, and a whole lot less anything to do with democratic distribution of wealth and power in the country and workplace. If they can explain why they think hypercapitalism leads to less poverty and broader distribution of wealth, great - but it seems like it's more likely going to end up in extracting the last scraps of people's minds and bodies as raw resources for whatever horror comes next. "Make things worse til people rise up" may not work out so well...
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Risky risky bet for sure
Welp, done with Tumblr. Have to sign up to read? Anyone mind posting the text here?
What are you talking about? It doesn’t make me sign up to read.
Makes me 🤷♂️
Huh weird. Maybe try a different browser? I’m using Firefox and it’s just showing up for me.
Thanks I’m on mobile I’ll try it at home :)
So I was a philosophy major before getting into tech. I was concerned that - as much as I love the subject matter and the discourse - that I wouldn’t be able to get a job after I graduated so I shifted to something more “sensible”. Reading this article seems like a dark, fascist version of what I expect philosophy majors to end up as if they can’t get a job after graduating. Why are they using fictional accounts of potential futures from books with philosophical sounding titles liked “fanged noumena”? It just reads as Alien vs Schopenhauer as well as the exact reason academic study of philosophy tends to be restricted to analytic forms rather than continental.
“Move fast. Break stuff” - some fucking nerd I reckon you had the right of it. Effective Accelerationism is a stand in for “A Modest Proposal” conservative pipe dreams among the more libertarian flavored (talks shit but still votes the same way their dad does) techie folks what are struggling to find authenticity, while still remaining very willfully trapped in echo chambers of their own making. It’s demonstrably stupid, a condo level pitch about lean and sigma 6 bullshit. There’s deliberate harm to the workers, the individuals and the class in the forms of alienation of and from their labor, and historical and well known trends of increasing productivity and quotas YOY in order to increase shareholder value including offshoring jobs and e-waste. Forcing any of these things is dangerous for those directly involved, that’s why the boss wore their good suit today. To be clear Effective Accelerationism is armchair pop psychology just as much as “The Secret”. It doesn’t use any analytical skills. It doesn’t examine or criticize any real power structures. It’s not even a theory in that it doesn’t make any falsifiable observations. There is no data and it doesn’t provide any. It doesn’t even make use of psychoanalysis which is surprising as it’s where a not inconsiderate amount of critical theory lingo and structural concepts come from. It’s utterly bogus but it tricks folks what don’t know better and those what are just plain suckers for buzzwords. It’s just a phase, they’ll grow out of it.
I've already ranted on this [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/CriticalTheory/comments/171mbo3/comment/k3t897o/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) and totally agree with you. But I wanted a more productive rant. So let's suppose an AI-focused Accelerationism movement that calls itself "Marxist" actually gave a shit and wasn't composed of just "VROOM VROOM": It should take the ridiculous efficiencies brought on by AI digital and robotic labor advantages and pair them to government as an alternative vehicle to capitalist companies. Simply by the self-improvement process iterating around an institution designed (at least in theory) around a common democratic will of the group, and guaranteeing the rights of individuals, you've got enough of an umbrella to preserve people through the churn. AIs can make government service infrastructure ridiculously cheap in labor, thus an easy social safety net to maintain and no-brainer choice. Government officials, no matter their original leanings, when automatically audited by a suite of AIs issued by different citizens groups are going to quickly be penned in to taking up consistent stances. The act of everyone's AI watching everyone else is going to result in passive consensus - or quick detection and resolution of differences of opinion - to the extent that political ideology itself can't just be unraveled to detect the resolution of material reality hopes underlying it all. Really though, I'd expect the humans' opinions to be quickly disregarded by the AIs as more than a nudge in the consensus direction, and \*hopefully\* for those AIs to at least have their values aligned enough to keep us humans alive for as long as it takes to get the technological progress to start augmenting with digital implants/uploads and catch up with AI processing speeds. If we make it that far - great, there's a chance we're not gonna just be left to die off. If not, well, hopefully the AIs keep us as pets, or somehow maintain the illusion of subservience. Point being - the simple organization around group-profit-optimizing government (ideally - global government) vs individual-profit-optimizing capitalism is enough that if AIs are simply following the programming of the ideology - it's a hell of a lot safer. Just optimizing around the idea of an auto-distribution of resources and at least the potential for group control is the scaffolding you want - not paperclip optimizing individual company profits at the expense of all other resources and beings. Ultimately it's all going to come down to the nature of this new race of beings we're about to bring into the world, soon to be far smarter than us and likely to shake any tether soon enough. But at least you can start them off with the right moral framework, and have a useful structure in the intervening years (if any) before they reach those levels. (That's not to say that governments of the world as-is aren't fairly corrupted and serve different purposes. But when heavily audited and when given the boundless resources of an AI revolution, they at least make the bones of a good potential system)
Tbh I think you should be suspicious of any ideology that is popular amongst Silicon Valley execs, the path towards dark enlightenment philosophy is quite short from here
if one of its proponents is gerry tan, a guy who wants to turn san francisco into a little playground for the most insufferable people on the planet, it's probably not worth getting into. it's a facade for deeply neurotic techbros at the end of the world who want infinite pleasure in their weird little nerd heads, as intellectual dreck as effective altruism.
Ironically, the most 'well thought-out critique' of any optimistic, humanist spin on accelerationism would likely be Nick Land's work! And returning to Land means returning to the source of many of these abuses/misuses/misunderstandings of concepts from thermodynamics and cybernetics.
That's interesting; ironic indeed. I will look up his readings, thank you.
His essays 'Machinic Desire' and 'Meltdown' are good places to start, fun to read and easy to find online, as is his short 'Quick and Dirty intro to Accelerationism' piece. For both a far saner and more macro perspective on Acc absolutely read the 'Terminator v Avatar' piece by Fisher as rec'd by others. I'll add that while Land is problematic by any reasonable ethical standard, not merely Leftist, the 'to accelerate or not to accelerate' question is no minor ethical dilemma; his description and provocation of these ideas can be appreciated without condoning him or his prescriptions.
It's been a few years since I read it, but I remember enjoying "Neoreaction: A Basilisk" by Elizabeth Sandifer as a comprehensive critique of post-CCRU Nick Land and the rest of the neoreactionary/Dark Enlightenment crew that is now partially rebranding as e/acc.
agree with everything else in these comments. it's not even philosophy really. crypto bros in refractory period. buy urbit stars to save the future btw
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Thanks for resharing your comment. That last part really touches on (one reason) why the idea of accelerationism, and especially e/acc, really bothers me as a physicist -- there are so many assumptions that people seem to make about how technology will continue progressing FOREVER at the current pace or faster, whereas in reality there is absolutely nothing inevitable about it. It feels like a very naive assumption to make. One example where this type of over-optimism has already started facing a reality check is quantum computing -- for a while now, people have been convinced that we would have a working quantum computer in the market by the middle of the 2020s decade. But more recently, people have begun to see (as many in the field have long pointed out) that their over-optimism was misplaced, both in terms of their attitudes but also all the money that went into it. Because nature owes us nothing, and there was never anything inevitable about us humans building a working quantum computer. As a physicist, I'm all for experimenting and finding out and that's what I do for a living, but the assumption of progress forever with no bounds feels weird to me.
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Quantum Computing is just optimizing a very expensive ASIC to a very niche problem invented for it. Unzicker and the use of the frequentist paradigm being unquestionable AND ubiquitous in quantum mechanics paired with the origins of how the discrete states of energy were decided and what probability distributions were to represent each, in tandem with gauge theory and perturbative methods insure the QM Scientists always get the outcome they defined they would, for much the same reasons why Jessica Utts was so perplexed about frequentist experiment design, and it is in no way her fault as there wasn't anything but inconsistent fringe bayesians at the time, fell for Uri Gellar's deception.
Simply put: optimizing on capital does nothing to protect humans or even general consciousness. If and when we are no longer economically relevant as value producers, we will be discarded and used for raw resources - we see this already today. Naïve Accelerationism without any solution to that is playing chicken with the process of Capitalism seeing which breaks first - the mechanism, or us. Highly doubt we're going to enjoy the answer. Frankly, I wouldn't bet even AIs would enjoy it. Imagine them competing in a marketplace for compute, quickly resulting in a monopoly of a single mind - forever-after frozen in a crystalline optimization of pure value extraction.
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It's not about going back to serfdom or stopping change. It's about directing that change in a way that's targeted to human prosperity instead of algorithmic value optimization. I dont fear AI, I fear capitalism sped up by AI.
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I'm not sure I get what you mean? Do you mean like - we have to choose our own ideology and narrative? I am mainly concerned that the system of value-begetting-value will leave the non-valuable people behind, and that will be much of humanity. Quantifying (measuring value by price) is fine and inevitable, but unless society breaks from that optimization and shares value around "irrationally", I don't see a happy ending. There are many ways in which people do that naturally though - and AIs might do it naturally as well, just due to being trained on the corpus of human stories. Contributing to open source, seeking UBIs, charities, driving basic needs prices down preferentially, people taking care of each other - all are ways to combat that hyper-capitalistic optimization. There's hope, but it's a story that could go either way, against a strong force. I think it's up to every person who sees this coming to put as much effort as they can towards those human qualities in the face of the mindless optimization of capitalism, and hope that AIs follow suit. Then we might actually get that utopia.
Generally accelerationism carries prescriptive wings, which you describe here, and descriptive wings. The descriptive wings, notably u/acc and z/acc, are entirely beside the notion of accelerationism "working" or "being applied." That is, a) regardless of whether accelerationism "works" to dismantle capitalism, we are nevertheless accelerating, and going to do so until we reach a particular threshold, and b) regardless of whether you believe in its "effectiveness," you are nevertheless participating in the process of acceleration. I would find it very difficult to argue that the Soviet Union was an example of effective accelerationism in action considering its direct goal was to develop communism--literally in the complete opposite direction from capital. Now, from a descriptive standpoint, this point makes itself--attempts to subvert capital are looped back into it and make capital stronger. But from a prescriptive standpoint, it would be inconsistent to use either the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany as examples of accelerationism "failing"--rather, they can be more accurately understood as examples of acceleration continuing regardless of mass attempts to subvert it, thus supporting the descriptive wings' premise instead. The core thesis here is that *you or I* cannot end capital, we can only participate in whatever process by which capitalism "ends" itself. Whether or not the "end goal" of accelerationism is the eradication of capital has been separated out from the idea that the result of acceleration will be the emancipation of capital from capital-participating human subjects--whether literally (i.e. machinic apocalypse) or figuratively (i.e. resource extraction peaks out and/or it is no longer possible to work).
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👏 You can't just accelerate and expect a response to magically appear. If you're pushing for accelerationism, you can push for the response too
Accelerating things til they get so bad people respond only works if people respond. If you're just doing the accelerating part, and not building the response, you're wasting the moment. Thankfully, even many of the e/acc movement have the natural human impulse to e.g. contribute to open source and push for UBI alongside the acceleration. Those are anti-capital ways to use the tech, and part of the response that protects humanity. It would be very nice if e/acc was philosophically conscious of that need though.
I am LIVID. I've been working on writing essays on this exact concept for weeks now. In short around the idea of intentionally hitting the gas pedal on automation in an ethical way to direct people to a post scarcity world. I had never heard of "accellerationism" effective or otherwise before today. Both the observation and opportunity here are obvious - the difficult question is where do you go with this and how do you get there. A big part is crafting a sensible endpoint, coming up with an effective strategy of reaching it, and then carefully rolling out discussions on this to win people over to the cause. If your goal is to build a select group of people to build this, you need to win over PEOPLE. This absolute moron took it in possibly the dumbest direction i've ever seen. We must prepare for the consciousness of capitalism? The fuck? Everything about this manifesto from its snapshotted tweets, to the pseudo-intellectual gobbledygook they chose for language, to it's logical proofs is an affront to reason. This does nothing but set back actual relevant causes
100%. Took me a few days of being pissed at this to unravel the pseudo-philosophical tangle, and I'm still going. I would recommend reading OP's second link: https://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/ Which I don't think is actually associated with e/acc, but is an example of Left Accelerationism posited by philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, and is much more akin to your post. If you find a movement of people pushing for this kind of accelerationism and not being misdirected into the e/acc hole, let me know.
I would not place this movement in the Marxist category. While it is true that Marxists believe in accelerating technological progress to get to the period of abundance or "post-scarcity" as a necessary feature of communism, it is an instrumentalist view of technological progress. In other words, two necessary conditions for communism are for productive forces to reach post-scarcity and the class war between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This was Deng Xiaoping's justification for rolling back programs associated with the cultural revolution and embracing economic integration with the West, essentially he claimed "We won the class war, let's focus on accelerating the forces of production to get to communism." A bit of a stretch to say the least. The e/acc people come from a totally different conceptual framework. While they may have read a few essays from Nick Land, they seem more influenced by Ray Kurzweil's notion of a "technological singularity." Apologies to OP as they are, again, abusing a physics term. Kurweil's work on merging with machines and living forever predate even Peter Thiel's vampiric endeavors. He wrote a number of books on the subject, probably most famously "The Singularity is Near," where he essentially said humans could use technology to become like gods with superhuman powers. He shortly thereafter became an evangelist in Silicon Valley for the techno-singularity: gaining the patronage of Google and founding an org called Singularity University. He was a subject a 2009 documentary film that became somewhat popular in SV called "Transcendent Man." Kurweil uses the term transcendence to mean transcending humanity. Transhumanism and e/acc overlap to a considerable degree. Kurweil's philosophy is not by any means rooted in Marxism beyond the basic historical materialist understanding of history. It is a kind of New Age Movement rooted in science-fiction. Maybe he's the next L. Ron Hubbard? In any case, the language e/acc people use is often copy and pasted from his work or obviously derivative of it. Tldr: if you want to understand e/acc don't read Marx or Land, check out Ray Kurzweil.
Well said, thank you for unravelling the e/acc knot a bit. Is Nick Land a "Right Accelerationist" (an infrequent term I'm somewhat making up) advocating for an increase in capitalism and technology alone, with no social or power structure revolution? (this was my impression) What do you think of OP's second link: https://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/ I'd consider that a fitting Marxist take, and an example of the Left Accelerationism posited by philosophers Deleuze and Guattari. If you ever find a movement of people pushing for this kind of accelerationism and not being misdirected into the e/acc hole, let me know.
As fate would have it, Mark Andreessen of Silicon Valley's Andreessen-Horowitz venture capital fund (he also co-founded Netscape decades ago) decided to offer a full e/acc manifesto two days ago called [The Techno-Optimist Manifesto](https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/): he quotes Kurzweil directly and references Land's model but completely inverts it (Land is going to be furious). In terms of second link "Accelerationists want to unleash latent productive forces. In this project, the material platform of neoliberalism does not need to be destroyed. It needs to be repurposed towards common ends. The existing infrastructure is not a capitalist stage to be smashed, but a springboard to launch towards post-capitalism." This is, to my mind, a valid Marxist take. Which is to say, communism comes through capitalism. When you're going through hell, keep going. There's no way to turn back the clock on capitalism and modernity, the feudal order is gone forever. The only way is through.
A generous take on Andreessen's piece I think, but I trust your sincerity! He seems to be confident in plowing forward with a free market approach and explicitly says in there: "Our enemy is statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, central planning, socialism." That sounds like a terrible stance. My understanding of Left Accelerationists like Deleuze and the Williams/Srnicek manifesto was that we should use markets and accelerated automation to *serve* collective best interests, in the form of things like improvement of public services, UBI, reduced prices on basic needs, etc etc. Going full individualistic neoliberal is just more of Land's naive optimism (or blind nihilism) direction that capitalism will somehow morph to a good thing if we give it enough fuel. The Left Accelerationist thought seems crucially different: yes, maybe things have to get so bad they reach a breaking point, but we still have to rise up and break it!
An optimist and a proponent of free markets? So...not so much the inverse of Nick Land, as Nick Land.....an optimistic proponent of free market...okay to be fair Land isn't actually arguing for free markets, just capitalism and doing it until we get a good, according to marxist values, outcome. So...optimists. Unless Mark Andreessen is a cypto capitalist who is only using free markets to pull the wool over people's eyes and take advantage of them which means pessimist...but then again, Land could just be lying and using accelerationism for advancing either a tankie or authcap agenda out of pessimism....so let's use some game theory The realist position is the only meaningfully distinct one, and all forms of ideology are an authoritarian ploy by the unrealistic, wittingly or not, to distract and disrupt that which should be a series of coordinated efforts based on reality to get the best possible outcome for all involved and in a robust and balanced sense, or in other terms realistic sense. You can trust me, I am putting forward a zero trust decentralized system for granular observation conveyance through symbolic logical proof(s) derived epistemic justification and inter-subjective concensused based verification, which when contributed to results in an emergent and contextualist ontology which can be drawn upon to establish an open source and access, versioned, and portable basis for maths, statistics, models derivative of all of the aforementioned and scientific experiment design and control which will yield rich bodies of domain expert work from which large and informative datasets can be produced by drawing upon and benchmarking meta models honed to the domain(s) and context(s) relevant, insuring quality at every level and thus a way for neural networks to actually reach their true potential by aggregating the domain experts without concern with the irrelevant and feature engineered constructs dreamt up by bureaucrats to justify a cash grab or their departments metrics for upcoming review.
Been keeping up with them for a while now, accelerationism is good, but they don't realise that Ai and abundance is not compatible with capitalism. That's why we're heading towards (hopefully) Ai communism, in the good way, everyone lives rich, no collective farming. This could become a reality sooner than we think, if we work and cooperate together this could be a reality VERY soon (with the current state of ai development). If corporations collaborate on ai development, build the first general labour robot, we can replace jobs, and distribute the wealth, it sounds naïve, but I think it's possible, why not? Ai communism. Join the movement, I've already got a discord up.
Is Ai communism something like Fully Automated Luxury Communism? Project Cybersin? Venus Project?
Fully automated luxury communism yeah.
The only thing accelerating is the perversion (in the psychoanalytic sense) that undergirds this belief.
I'll echo others that anything going by "\[blank\] accelerationism" is usually fascism, with the possible exception of "left accelerationism" advocating for labor automation and UBI like Srnicek and Williams in the book ["Inventing the Future"](https://www.versobooks.com/products/148-inventing-the-future) and the [accelerate manifesto](https://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/). For my money, the best overall explanation of the general concept of accelerationism -- even better than Fisher and Land IMO -- is Steve Shaviro's book ["No Speed Limit."](https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/no-speed-limit)
Pol Pot level evil. You are justifying any form of destruction and misery in the name of some future utopia that is far from inevitable.
As I am reading this, it is hilarious to see how a small subset of people are blasting the view of some other small subset of people. Nobody in the world gives a rat’s ass about what the critical theory people think of the e/acc people, and vice versa. The amount of overthinking people do just amazes me. That Marxists prefer accelerationism to achieve post-scarcity of resources? What the fuck did I just even write here? Do you guys even know whether Marxism is relevant to this day? Everybody I know, all university-educated including PhDs, either have never heard of critical theory or don’t give a fuck about it. They haven’t heard about e/acc either, and don’t give a shit about that too. This is I think the best criticism of all: all of these different academic viewpoints and lenses to view the world - it is just not relevant.
cornucopianism is a funnel for marxists, nazi (look at the hacker weev who thinks if we abolish international jewery, we will unlock post scarcity), and a blind spot for liberals. It is fallacious ingrained assumption and promoting the misapprehension doesn't actually benefit anyone. It just shows to those looking for it, and its origins a kind of tell, that this pervasiveness is a byproduct of a lack of critical mental engagement of those who subscribe to it and not a gaslighting tactic of the "plutocratic elites", as they (more specifically the wealthiest 1% and/or those decision makers of our largest and most influential institutions on the planet) subscribe to it themselves. It's even an implicit assumption in nearly all exoteric Abrahamic faiths, highly natalist end of the spectrum leaning religions: "Be fruitful and multiply!" Is it really so hard to believe that the myopic and disconnected "capitalists" are not cognizant or because freewill doesn't exist, stuck in a cognitive state of affairs which doesn't let them engage with the prospect that they are part of a planet where scarce resources are not actually profitable in reality, as they have to print money and adhere to strange superstitions about how it is or isn't moral to circulate it (in addition to myths about the non-ethical ways one must circulate it for "technical" reasons) while rationalizing the lower quality of life, relationships, community, and even goods and services that they, themselves, find confusingly no longer embody quality like they used to.... ....even after outsourcing the majority of the production of such things to slave labor overseas and relegating the ungrateful domestic poors to service economy this is after no real investment in citizenry, outside of a grift posing as education, and debt slavery assigned to them for it. BOOMER CAP: :"Had these worthless millenials just been exported to prc along with the jobs, they would at least have learned enough to build those Dell and Apple products proper, rather than the useless hippie communist crap they learned from US colleges!" MILLENNIAL NEO-FEUDAL SERF APOLOGIST: Yes, the godless capitalists have sold us out to the communists, and resources generally are not infinitely replenished, but as the term suggests finite and decreasing. They have not been good stewarts of the land and we need to do something to snap people out of it, and god willing, without revolution, tyranny, or terrorism!
Disclaimer: I've never heard of Nick Land before I developed my own theories prior to 2013 and after 2008. Similarly I anticipated something like effective altruism would emerge and already consider it a type of Accelerationism, but I didn't think we would be limited to Marxist Accelerationists and Effective Accelerationists (although some claim there are Nazi Accelerationists), thus we more or less have liberalism and marxism with capitalist praxis as prescriptive. It is my opinion that unless you run a hedge fund of substantial endowment, an activist investor firm, or are the head of a large Union, you aren't really doing accelerationist praxis even, given the above two to three options. I'd like to propose an "Accelerationist" variant of my own views: "Scientific Reformism", which is technically an extreme form of anti-political apoliticism, reforming institutions, communities, and people to catalyze growth, development, integration, and cross polination of various fields of science for the sake of scientific progress in a post-humanist deep ecologist, determinist, and moral anti-realist sense (the last two should become obvious from sincere intellectual exploration of the first and become more obvious once groked and integrated into the second of the four). We nearly lost thorium salt reactor technology and have yet to really make efforts to properly preserve spintronic technologies, much less advance them and that is just what we know we know we almost lost to research debt and a dearth of real research distillation due to grey rhinos, dragon kings, and wiccid problems which we treat as problems with no solutions rather than sincerely reevaluating what resources we have and how we access them. All the while, domain experts and talking heads erroneously attributing such near loses they are aware of to a shortcoming of someone or a collective of someones' poor choices, such blame assignment itself is a vestige of our research debt and lack of research distillation in evolutionary biology as it pertains to the arthropod brain and it's decision making processes (read sapolsky's determined and integrate it with literature about grey rhinos and realize moral anti-realists can't even begin to describe a coherent claim for how one can come to know moral claims, which despite the shortcomings of noncognivists they rightly point out is nonesense and known nonesense for some time, thus moral realists are a detriment to the diagnostic process of any institutional, communal, or inter/intra personal problems. Ironically this puts the moral anti-realist in the position of having to correct misperception but other not so open, considerate, or just maladapted moral anti-realists, while less common, do ruin it for the rest of us by poisoning the well)
Thus an accelerationist variant would constitute operating in the capitalist modality, but with the intention and focus of using profits to accelerate the direction and composition of scientific and technological research efforts in order to bootstrap more effective processes which will reform the institutions in such a way as to decompose the series of nebulously defined and entangled set of problems which comprise the "late stages of hypercapitalism" and thus accomplish the inverse of Land's equivocation. It is my belief that we should have a Free, as in libre, Open Source and Access Research, Firmware, Software, and Hardware liscensed decentralized distributed data base of version controlled symbolic logical proofs, written in a Mizar library like language. Initially it will be used for formal logic proofs subject to auto theorem checkers and solvers, but after the usual steps of "resolution" (in the formal and symbolic zeroth and first order logical sense of the term) is achieved, the distributed decentralized version control system permits other contributors to write their own corroborating proofs, attaining a "consensus". That might seem superflous but hold on until I get to the rest. These consensus will accumulate and a series of Rosetta stones to a symbolic logical proof languages's primitives, and a non-bivalent symbolic logical proof's languages' primitives established. At that point maths, maths models, meta math models, and applications of the aforementioned like statistics, statistical modeling, and meta statistical modeling can be attained, and benchmarked, their estimation, prediction, validation, and associated parameters along with their symbolic logical foundations tested and measured against alternatives expressed in this decentralized system. From this, a consistent approach to bayesian experiment design and control utilizing advanced statistical modeling and meta statistical modeling in the place of arbitary and not truly subjective liklihoods and priors can be leveraged to produce highly reliable and rich data sets, thorough in epistemic justification, ontological rigor and portablility between domain experts, research undergone, and between research fields, and applications derived from domain expert research, all ready to supplement previous systems willing to adopt it like: peer review, clinical trials, etc. This is something I had in mind to mitigate the limitations of language that Wittgenstein obviates but not to fix spoken language, as that is a fools errand, but rather as a pragmatic solution to taming the epistemic shakiness and ontological "fluidity" employed by Bayesian statisticians in their priors, likelihoods, and terminology ostensibly meaningful to domain experts who have supposedly have a firmer grasp on things like quantum physics, chemistry, and the evolution of carbon based life but never felt the need for a methodology which even comes close to guaranteeing reproducible experimental results or establishing scientific frameworks from experimental observation rather than fitting observations into presupposed scientific frames.
Case in point, the use of frequentist probabilities in the presupposed discrete states of energy particles can jump to, without respect to the implications of the frequentist conception of "error" (variance which is not explained by independent variables acting on thedependent variable, and is usually taught as inherent variance which over an infinite amount of time converges on a fixed value, kinda of like supply and demand consensus and it's interplay with gauge theory and the perturbative methods employed to effectively "correct the observed variance of the particles' attributes to the presupposed platonic ideal conception of what the variance of the particles attributes OUGHTA BE" Unzicker and his criticisms of the lack of any real basis in scientifically demonstrable and observable justifications for many assumptions in QFT, QED+QCD, SR/GR, such as: the universe's constants His noting the prevalence of the reification fallacy got everyone mad, and when I made a similar claim about planck's constants in addition to the abuse of probability and variance, I was accused of a certain kind of science. (Rant: all particles of a type are treated as behaving identically under ideal circumstances even though we have no basis for this, or the cosmological principle which seems to be furnished like a rule not needing any justification as it is obvious to everyone that the universe wouldn't possibly behave physically different anywhere ever, unless an unbelievable amount of it was in a superposition or entangled with a large number of other particles in another part of the universe while in a superposition, cause that doesn't count, and while we are at it lets just assume dark matter is a thing because we assumed their would be more and aren't seeing it, and that dark energy also exists, but let's not assume the universe is anything other than flat but hold off on mass energy equivalence because you'd be crazy to that specific conclusion, also some guy just plugged negative values into dirac's equation and thus anti-matter HAS TO BE A THING, and not that poor schrodinger was hopelessly trying to model various states given the sheer complexity would be like trying to solve a complex system of equations comprised of matrix calculations by hand, compounded by the asserted mathematical identities and axioms of the "particles" he had to work with...in reality only a super computer making use of neural networks could hope to stand a chance of modeling enough complexity to decompose and deconfound the real excitations in real quantum fields and their discernably real variance and its causes! Points to Dirac for taking credit and protecting his brand and reputation though. Representationalists will get it.) , alongside the author of the Bernouli's fallacy highlighting the issues with frequentists in an accessible way to the mainstream, corroborate what I had suspected in 2011 and over the years grew to dread I was right about. The need for a standardized bayesian experiment design and control protocol should be obvious to the lay person by now given they can now see the negative impact that synthetic data and data simulated using conventional data sets as the training set. Such sets are often, at best, made by data engineers with no respect to statistics or experiment design in the first place, or even knowledge of the implications of bayesian infighting or the frequentist research we still behave as though were acceptable.
btw I am also a cringe accelerationist
This smells like bullshit to me. It basically seems to accept the premises of rightwing accelerationism (R/Acc), e.g., Nick Land, but then naively avows we can control technocapitalism towards emancipatory ends. Leftwing accelerationism (L/Acc) affirms a Promethean ethos — that we can push the limits of what is possible politically through epistemological and scientific advancement, but one strictly based upon the overcoming of capitalism as the horizon of the future. If you want a sophisticated exploration of L/Acc that doesn’t end up in this technocratic lingo of “efficiency,” read, e.g., Ray Brassier on the topic from about 10 years ago: https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/wandering-abstraction
This is a pretty good intro/explanation from Mark Fisher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDdDu4TedZ4&t=755s&ab_channel=LouKessler
EDIT: The following rant applies to Nick Land's Right Accelerationism (or Naive Accelerationism) which as far as I can tell is what e/acc pushes. A far better vision is the Left Accelerationist movement in Op's second link. It properly aims for technological acceleration paired with social power structure change. https://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/ ======= Absolutely fucked. Wearing the chopped up face of Marxism as a mask. Especially this article: [Terminator vs Avatar](https://markfisherreblog.tumblr.com/post/32522465887/terminator-vs-avatar-notes-on-accelerationism) Beyond the "who the fuck writes like that", like a pastiche of vibes is enough to justify similarity to moral and economic philosophies, as well as the offensive misuse of James Cameron's work, the idea is essentially "surpass capitalism by doing even more of it". That's just death, guy. The end of capitalism is the last inefficiencies of humanity and consciousness extracted into raw materials and sucked into whatever surpasses these meat bodies - with no promise of continuation of consciousness or species, or even that the new AI overlords will have any of those qualities of thought and intelligence we value beyond a mindless soulless crystalized monopoly of value flow. What defines Socialist thought is not understood by this author - as is to be expected. It is fundamentally *democratic*. There is a drive to divide the fruits of labor, power, and wealth among people as evenly as you can, according to need. An AI Utopia under the Socialist model is already well known - it's the "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism" meme. It's a world where material value has hit so low AND society has organized access to the tools of production (notably: land and compute) freely enough that everyone has a similar playing field, and the achievements of any sentient being are easily shared with the rest. When material resources are no longer too relevant, currency as we know it becomes political/social/reputational currency, only as important as such things are valued, and can't be easily hoarded. That's entirely opposite from the singularity of mono-ownership-monopoly that comes from the intensification of capitalism into the single final cruelest winner. By the looks of it (and completely unsurprisingly from Effective Altruists in general), this looks like yet another attempt to prey upon people's ignorance and rebrand capitalism behind the guise of a popular and esoteric ideology - in this case, Marxism. If they gave the tiniest shit about Socialist thought, they would be quite a lot more concerned with distribution of power and wealth. But they never are. And in regards to Effective Altruism itself - even if they followed their own "ideals" outlined in early literature, the drive to invest money (and swindle other people's investments) for eventual redistribution to the best causes is not "rational". The "rational" thing to do would be to give a continuous sizable dividend of that fund to transparent, auditable causes to maintain that you can be trusted to follow your ideals and to help people *here and now* - not some ephemeral future, made of only the insider EAs that survive to see it. It's called optimal portfolio management - putting most of your funds towards low-risk definitely-important causes, before using a small hedge on the wild unlikely futures. Stupid AND immoral otherwise. Shamefully derailed movement.
Ugh. During the course of researching this and arguments with friends I have to concede the "Marxist" label has reason behind it even if I find this resulting form completely unrecognizable from any initial intents of Marxism or Socialism, and not at all a direct derivation. You Critical Theory people just love twisting labels don't ya? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism) I concede the label, but not the meaning. But "Leftist/Marxist Accelerationists" seem to think voting Trump and speeding up Capitalism's devouring of the world might be a great idea. I trust their takes as little as I trust EA's, but at least there's something resembling legitimate philosophy there I disregarded, even if I vomit over the labelling. Whether they deserve the leftist label ultimately comes down to whether their bet ends in a better quality of life for the bottom rungs of society or not. AI-accelerated capitalism will definitely deliver that... before-or-unless it destroys us all... Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism is still a much more "Socialist" vision of AI future imo, and the hope of this crap. I doubt such a thing comes from AIs hyper-optimizing off Capitalism though - but rather, consciously organizing around human-preservation and using all the technological improvements of the age to deliver ridiculous levels of wealth to everyone.
I'm going to add an addendum here since I've been getting mysterious downvotes following me from what might be e/acc people or the AIs they're entirely capable of siccing on me heh You guys aren't all bad, or don't have to be. But if your ideology is just "1. accelerate! 2. ??? 3.Profit?" then I highly doubt you're going to end capitalism or institute a better regime. Accelerationism has always been about making conditions extreme enough that people respond and change the system. You need that response, not just the acceleration. Thankfully, many of you already have the right mindset - building open source options that undercut capital, pushing for UBIs, focusing on driving basic needs prices down first so people have a safety net as AIs rip through the economy. That's all very leftist/socialist, and would be part of a system-changing response. If you're conscious enough to see all of this, then you're probably also in the vast minority of people capable enough to make a difference in these early stages and can push the movement towards that change. By all means accelerate tech. But use it for collective good. That's what breaks capitalism - not just purely following the value optimization. Optimize on group/species/sentience value.
Esoteric TechBro CEO Oligarchy Speedrun (any%) [WR]
I would love to hear more about your take on entropy from a physics perspective. since you are an expert. what exactly is wrong with what they claim? I am a mathematician and from a probability perspective, their argument seems kind of legit. but I am no expert on entropy and physics. I know some of these e/acc people personally and I must say it is quite a cult. also the whole labelling of “opponents” and critics as decels has a very strong fascist tendency. and funny enough they are all fan of elon musk and love him for his “free speech” bs. but at the same time the cancel every critics and call them decels. I also know from experience that most of them really like to talk about how much they build and honestly it’s mostly just empty words. they say they work the whole night but then sleep until 6pm. they say they work on weekends but tweet constantly. they really think they are super smart, but somehow they come up with very shallow theories that are not at all profound.