from Hacker News

Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in

by benpink on 5/11/17, 7:09 AM with 58 comments

• by defen on 5/11/17, 6:30 PM

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

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

• by nottorp on 5/11/17, 6:21 PM

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

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

• by jtmcmc on 5/11/17, 6:51 PM

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

• by Sharlin on 5/11/17, 6:46 PM

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

• by Apocryphon on 5/11/17, 9:52 PM

  Another excellent piece on the ideology for the layman:

  "The Darkness Before the Right" https://theawl.com/the-darkness-before-the-right-84e97225ac1...

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

• by mannigfaltig on 5/11/17, 6:36 PM

  There is always a fringe philosophy that had it right.

• by gumby on 5/11/17, 8:28 PM

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

  But his prose...delightful!

• by Animats on 5/11/17, 7:13 PM

  Two words: Javascript frameworks.

  Now that's accelerationism.

• by atemerev on 5/11/17, 9:03 PM

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

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

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

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

• by elevenfist on 5/12/17, 2:43 AM

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

• by gt_ on 5/11/17, 8:53 PM

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

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

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

• by mixedCase on 5/11/17, 6:02 PM

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