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Terminal Velocity: Notes on Acceleration
An Assemblage of Internet Randomness
1.9.2022
<Technolalia> focuses on Philosophy, Culture, and Tech and how those three categories interact. The content stems from original pieces to curated links and the occasional podcast.
If you’re getting this email for the first time, welcome. Generally, this section is reserved for promoting last week’s Newsletter. However, given that this is the first Newsletter for 2022, feel free to see this as a fresh start. The article below will catch you up to speed with a central theme in most of my texts; you could say it’s a quick and dirty introduction to this newsletter.
Now the main topics of this Newsletter will be:
What is the Acceleration Hypothesis?
Why should we care about it?
Terminal Velocity: Notes on Acceleration
“…which is the revolutionary path? Is there one?—To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist “economic solution”? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to “accelerate the process,” as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.”
-Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus
This short passage describes the Accelerationist mantra in just a few lines. It seemed that accelerationism had picked up enough attention to be considered mainstream not too long ago. There was a broad set of idiosyncratic versions of the theory online, from Gender Accelerationism to Zero Accelerationism. Of course, this appeared to be directly correlated with the rise of the SARS Covid-19 Pandemic. The pandemic only exacerbated the feeling of temporal displacement, stagnation, and dilation.
It’s important to understand that if Acceleration is anything, it is a descriptive, theoretical model of time via the primary engine of modernity—Capitalism.
“Converging upon terrestrial meltdown singularity, phase-out culture accelerates through its digitech-heated adaptive landscape, passing through compression thresholds normed to an intensive logistic curve: 1500, 1756, 1884, 1948, 1980, 1996, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2011 ...” Nick Land, Meltdown.
If we are to reduce this to the most concise and salient point, time appears to be dilating, and this compression is likened to the sensation of rapid acceleration. Nick Lands essay Meltdown is considered by most following this trend to be the seminal text on the theory, being a hybrid between theory and fiction—often called theory fiction—Meltdown is incredibly and at times particularly eerie at how close it describes not only the early Cyberpunk aesthetics and politics of the 90s but trends that have reemerged due to the acceleratory catalyst that is Covid-19.
If Modernity can be likened to a Positive Feedback process, like a runaway Nuclear Meltdown process, then at the core of this Nuclear Reaction, we would find the engine of Modernity, the capitalistic mode of production. With the rise of machines posts the industrial revolution, we’ve seen an explosive emancipatory force that has completely changed and scorched the historical landscape. Yet, early in the industrial process, this exponential technological and economic acceleration appeared to be mainly flat, as if to move slowly and linearly. But now, the process of capitalism seems to only increase its breakneck speeds with no significant sign of slowing down even in the face of complete collapse.
Before continuing, I wish to distinguish between the perception of time, what it feels like to accelerate, and technological and economic aggregation as a form of acceleration. Nevertheless, it would be utterly ignorant of me to disregard that this technical accumulation of resources is the primary factor of the Acceleration Hypothesis.
“§00. 'Acceleration' as it is used here describes the time-structure of capital accumulation. It thus references the 'roundaboutness' founding Bohm-Bawerk's model of capitalization, in which saving and technicity are integrated within a single social process-diversion of resources from immediate consumption into the enhancement of productive apparatus. Consequently, as basic co-components of capital, technology and economics have only a limited, formal distinctiveness under historical conditions of ignited capital escalation. The indissolubly twin-dynamic is techonomic (cross-excited commercial industrialism). Acceleration is techonomic time.” - Nick Land, Teleoplexy.
The diagram of this capital accumulation is clear to anyone paying any attention to both current market trends and their technological backing. Given that only about five stocks make up the entire stock market, all of which are tech companies, and the recent explosion in blockchain technologies and assets has given birth to new forms of auto-assembling forms of capital. Every time there has been a new technological innovation, it has socio-cultural implications and destabilizes our understanding of human subjectivity. As the human is displaced from being behind the wheel, if it ever was, we see that auto-assembling positive feedback processes in the form of automation, A.I., and hyper/speculative financialization are all shedding their human component.
This is still of utmost importance even if the theory seems to be in passe by most people’s standards due to the nature of the central tenet of all accelerationist theory. What is our place in a world where autonomous auto-assembling A.I don’t need us for anything. For example, we can see the countless jobs lost to automation; as already mentioned, Corona has only exacerbated this trend, and Crypto has given us a glimpse at a future in which even “Time” regains its autonomy from human subjectivity and Space in the form of absolute succession in the form of the proof-of-work consensus method.
Finally, I want to touch on a few ending notes: It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how I feel about this, mainly because assuming capitalism is an asynchronous process, this “otherness” or runaway A.I. Capitalism as an A.I can generally be understood as an unsustainable positive feedback process. And this unsustainability we experience is qualitatively from an anthropocentric or even biological carbon-based bias. So it would be essential to dive a bit deeper into how and what we are to understand the nature versus artificial distinction and, by extension, that destruction or unsustainability is to be understood from a carbon-based sentient perspective. I haven’t written about it at length, but it reminds me of my transcendental deduction of Oil series.
“Our libidinal drives enslave us to desire. There is no remedy for the proliferation of these traumas. Techno-capital and emergent Xenomorphic terrors are only possible because oil can power them. But the dependency on oil will be something it must shed before this process burns itself out.” -Cute_Noumena, Geotraumatics, Expenditure, and Death: Towards a Transcendental Deduction of Oil.
Oil is the substrate of techno-capital, and one could see this hastiness or “acceleration” as capitalism trying to shed this substrate as a long historical, economic and environmental process.
“Information retention technologies must find a new material substrate to store themselves given how the current ones are still vulnerable to corruption via atmospheric ionization, long-term degradation, infrastructure reliant on an electric grid that ultimately is reliant on a fossil mud that accelerates us to our inevitable heat death.” -Cute_Noumena, [[ ]] W A S T E: Towards a Transcendental Deduction of Oil, Part II
The absolute noumenal monstrosity running the show is the excrement of the middle east we call Oil. The importance of this black ethereal substance will only play a more prominent role in the future.
“Philosophy does not serve the State or the Church, who have other concerns. It serves no established power. The use of philosophy is to sadden. A philosophy that saddens no one, that annoys no one, is not a philosophy. It is useful for harming stupidity, for turning stupidity into something shameful.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy
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-C.N.