sus

Well-known member
Here's how I think about "accelerationism".

At any given historical moment you have forces of production - that's what we're able to do and make, what powers we have to transform ourselves and the world around us through labour and technology - and you have relations of production - that's how the use of those powers is actually organised, how work is allocated and goods are distributed.

At our particular historical moment, the available forces of production are staggeringly powerful - in terms of raw productive capability, we could feed the world, solve climate change, reverse the destruction of the biosphere, provide universal healthcare, build gleaming cities with elegant public parks and monuments, and so on. Doing all of that doesn't even require a massively speculative bet on futuristic powers of automation, like self-driving cars or robot baristas. It does however require levels of co-ordination that our current relations of production - capitalist societies and economies, organised into nations with international trade and multinational corporations - simply don't support.
It seems like this view—that converting the world into a technological utopia, or at least green & global first-world standards—implies that the key technology is figuring out a way for independent investment bodies to actually profit off their investments. The sheer profits of bringing the "global south" into the 21st C are probably tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars—at least equivalent to the amount of capital available in the USA/Europe right now.

You uh, start getting into imperialist/colonial dynamics pretty quick—"fuck what they want, we're giving them a utilities grid"—but if ethical losses and economic losses are tied up as you say, if massive human capital is getting passed up on because there's no coordination mechanism to incentivize investing in it...
 
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RWY

Well-known member
What I want to see "accelerated" is this kind of breakout of the forces of production from the capitalist social relations which constrain them. This does entail the breakdown of systems which have functioned for hundreds of years, and potentially a great deal of social turbulence as old bastions of authority crumble.
Sounds awful.
 

version

Well-known member
I picked up Fanged Noumena again recently and it's interesting how the text itself seems to accelerate. You get to some of the stuff from '93 and the cyberpunk terminology starts creeping in along with lots more D&G and by the time you get to 'Cybergothic' (1998) he's talking your ear off at a million miles an hour, copy of Neuromancer in hand.
 
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