accelerationism

A Critique of the Accelerationist Attitude

By: mnold

28-02-2019

Before the Z/Acc/Collapse writing begins I want to address something that has irked me for basically the entirety of my time within the Accelo-sphere. That is the Acc-attitude or; Accitude.

Many people have commented on the Accelerationist ‘tech/nihil’ aesthetic, this is not to do with that.

At its machinic heart. Its techno-capitalist, techonomic heart, Accelerationism is an inhuman philosophy. The underlying forces of acceleration are pronounced and written of in such a way that one can come to no other conclusion than that they are other-than-human, nonhuman, even inhuman. Which poses a sort of paradoxical problem with regard to the attitude of Accelerationists. That is…they are all – at least the ones in our sphere – human. Fleshy, breathing, all-too-human…humans. Men, women, homosapiens blithering away at their keyboards commenting on the inhuman. Which in itself is sort of the impossibility of touching the or an actuality of the Outside. Perhaps it can be quasi-analysed via occult-numeric means, maybe, but we don’t know that.

Anyway, yes, humans. Meandering around the edges of what is supposed as a Cthulhic technomic entity/beast/force etc. The inhuman a priori psychopathy of Acceleration is assimilated into the writing of Acc theorists like the divine into things, it simply cannot integrate with our perception (Kant wins again). At least without an unavoidable clunky current running through it. A sense that something is always missing, something is always avoiding our full capacity, maybe because it understands our capacity to be human, or simply to be in the way destined for us.

With this said, the point of which it irks me is wherein digressions of war, evil and inhumanity spring to the surface in the writing, as if one is above all that. That the factors of horror, hell and reality of evil would not touch the lives of those who write in favor of such. A call for bombs, a loud call for a direct attack…but not anyway near me. How crude, how banal and pithy. A mainline into the arrogance of the literature itself, left and right. Arrogance, ignorance and apathy towards present reality due to amoralistic-promotion of an unprovable future is simply unforgivable. At best it is caustic literature, acidically burning through to a potential core of hatred, malaise and distrust; at worst it is a continuation of an anthropocentric cosmic bias that man even plays a part. You claim to know even a smidgen of inhumanity, and yet you project your supposed worthiness through a gauze of humane-understanding.

The methods of man tacked lazily onto a blueprint of machinic process. War, famine, poverty and death, all, more often than not, viewed from the gaze of a giddy tech-head. Writhing in frustration at their personal lacks of means to escape. Oh, I wish I could reverse cowgirl the means of production into a sentient machinic-thresher!

Accept your cosmic worth, become at least in part content with the situation of man and then address that which you must. The drool of fanatics – myself included – spills into a continually flowing basin of monkey-idiocy.

To take for granted the bias of one’s cosmic unbias. If man could ever become cosmically impartial he would surely go mad.

Z/Acc Primer

By: mnold

11-01-2019

Accelerate, politics

Where the hell do I even start with this absolute megalodon of societal pessimism? Well let’s start from the one titbit we have with regard to Z/Acc, this tweet:

R/Acc: An increasing proportion of the industrial surplus is being absorbed by the task of masking bio-social deterioration.
Z/Acc: Over 100% soon.
U/Acc: Oh c’mon.
L/Acc: Look, a squirrel!

— Outsideness (@Outsideness) February 21, 2018

It’s cute isn’t it? In fact, you’re now within the camp of people who know the entire Z/Acc Twitter lore, yep that’s it. And I know what you’re thinking, ‘Wait, that’s it? How and why do I keep seeing ‘Z/Acc’ everywhere on Twitter? I mean there hasn’t even been a badly formatted, unnecessarily long WordPress post on the topic ye-‘

Welcome, my friends, to the Z/Acc primer.

Endre Tot.

What does the Z of Z/Acc actually stand for you ask? Zero. Zero/Accelerationism or Zero Acceleration, the proposition of Z/Acc is that we’re not, or we’re not going to accelerate, not the process of deterritorializing capital, we’re not going to accelerate actual progress, overcoming, capital, utopian dreams, nothing…we’re going to accelerate absolutely nothing. However, at this stage that makes Z/Acc hardly different from collapse culture, secular eschatology or industrial meltdown, does it? I mean, saying that we’re not going to progress is hardly novel, there’s hundreds of books on the topic by plenty of conspiratorial nuts. (I’ll probably list a few to be quite honest.)

Anyway, let’s assimilate Z/Acc into the actual theory of Accelerationism, no one has yet done this, perhaps because Z/Acc is just too pessimistic, even for those weirdos on Twitter. Accelerationism is inherently a theory of time. Whether you take that time as McKenna’s timewave zero phase-esque thing, “Accelerationism is a demon, not an ideology” (as noted by Amy Ireland) or complex integration of economic means of escape via Kantian time. Either way, Acc is a theory of time. L/Acc wish for time to work in the typically mistaken (in my opinion) progressively linear fashion, and for time to work in their favor with regards to propagating a technological utopian (Marxist) society, complete with UBI‘s and all that meaning eroding jazz. R/Acc, in its initial formation and on what would be considered a material-chronic spacio-temporal plane – common reality – has not chained itself to the archaic theory set in chronic time, and as such acts as a reterritorialization movement in relation to L/Acc’s consistent compiling of ignorance. “You’re getting it wrong again, here’s what we might have done had you not overstepped your means…again.”

R/Acc’s inherent understanding of agency within unhinged time allows them to acquire the blackpill-visors and metaphorically witness capital’s convergent lasso come forth. With L/Acc searching for the – supposed – true agent of acceleration exterior to capitalism, which in the view of R/Acc is capitalism itself. Thus the spectrum upon which both L and R/Acc coexist is one of ontology, wherein one side (L/Acc) promote an ontologically objective structure of time, with humanities agency at the wheel, and the other end (R/Acc) accepting the ontology of the future as a constant. R/Acc accept that capital is critique. A rock dropped into water ripples outwards, reverse these waves and they culminate at the event of the rock’s splash, apply this metaphor to time and we have to ask what is controlling the waves, and what is the event. Put in a stupidly simplistic manner we might say that the waves are controlled and are themselves capital and the event is the Singularity. Hell, this is old hat, you can delve further if you like, I recommend the early NCRAP Lectures with Land.

So what does this make Z/Acc if acceleration is inherently temporally based. It makes it god-awful. A strange theorization of stagnation within a theory which is ever moving. Z/Acc seen from a layman’s point of view would be the immanentization of Gnon into the schema of man, let’s bring the attitude of Gnon to the fore and witness his apathy in relation to ‘Accelerative-man’. It’s tough to really talk of stagnation in a way appropriate for what springs to mind when I think of Z/Acc. Hell, perhaps Land said it best when he mentioned that the ‘Z’ of Z/Acc can quite aptly be replaced with ‘Zombie’. Let’s talk this hellish future of zombified, zero acceleration!

“and the story of the boy who cried wolf has two additional morals not often remembered: first, the wolves were real; second, they ended up eating the sheep.” – Greer, ‘The Twelfth Hour’.

In fact let’s begin with something Greer is very keen on bringing to the fore and something he expounds upon in great detail within his book The Long Descent (here) – a book which acts as a Z/Acc primer of its own, so let’s begin not with any external specifics acting upon civilization, but the inherent mistake civilization makes of itself, catabolic collapse:

Catabolic Collapse – in short:

Firstly, the classical collapse. Societies – according to Tainter (1988) – begin to break down once they reach a certain level of complexity, that level is such wherein a decrease in complexity would yield benefits to society. This is where acceleration stops, by the way. Each breakdown in social complexity leads to fragmentation into a lesser form of complexity, society becomes simpler as it breaks down. This is the traditional form of collapse, largely sociopolitical. Now one could argue that accelerating the process here would allow for the actualization of a patchwork of micro-states, many – or a few – of which would be able to create for themselves an accelerative society.

So what of catabolic collapse, “The theory of catabolic collapse, explains the breakdown of complex societies as the result of self-reinforcing cycle of decline driven by interactions among resources, capital, production, and waste.” (Greer, How Civilizations Fail)

Don’t tell those optimistic techno-capitalists, but feedback-loops work the other way too.

Resources (R): Naturally occurring exploitable resources (Iron ores etc),

Capital (C): Factors incorporated into the flow of society’s energy (Tools, food, labour, social capital etc.)

Waste (W): Fully exploited material that has no further use.

Production (P): Capital (C) and Resources (R) are combined to create new Capital (C) and Waste (W)

So from these constants (which are very simplistic as a means for ease of understanding this) we can begin to outline basic states of a civilization:

Steady state (SSv1): New capital from production to equal waste from production and capital [ C(p) = W(p) + W(c)] = SSv1

C(p) = New capital produced = W(p) existing capital converted to waste in the production of new capital inclusive of W(c) existing capital converted to waste outside of production. W(p) and W(c) is M(p), maintenance production. M(p) maintains capital stocks at existing levels. So:

SSv2 = [C(p) = M(p)]

In the absence of growth limitation capital can consistently be brought into the production process, making this process self-reinforcing, so, SSv2 = The Expansion of the USA during the 19th century. This self-reinforcing process may be called an anabolic cycle. It’s limited by two factors that tend to limit increases in C(p): Firstly resources which are finite, and as such have a ‘replenishment rate’ (r) or [r(R)]. This replenishment rate is largely due to natural processes and out of man’s control, leading into the Law of Diminishing Returns. Also these resources r(R) have a rate of use by society [d(R)] and the relationship between d(R) and r(R) is a core element of the process of catabolic collapse.

Resources used d(R) faster than their replenishment rate r(R) become depleted: d(R)/r(R)>i. This resource must be replaced by capital to sustain maintenance and as such the demand for capital increases exponentially as d(R) and r(R) both simultaneously increase. And so, unless you live in a society with unlimited resources, or resources that have unlimited replenishment (You don’t.) then C(p) cannot increase indefinitely because d(R) will eventually exceed r(R), society will use more shit than it has, basically. You can go a little further with r(R), because the processes of society are always reliant on the minimum resource, this is known as Liebig’s law.

Resource depletion – as shown above – is the first factor in overcoming the momentum of an anabolic cycle. The second is the relationship between capital and waste. M(p) rises and W(c) rises in proportion to total capital, alongside the fact that as M(p) rises, C(p) also rises as increased production requires increased capital – self-reinforcing – and this of course increases W(p). One must utilize these when studying the end of anabolic societal cycles wherein a civilization has two choices.

Choice 1: is SSv1.1: C(p) = M(p) and d(R) ≤ r(R) for every economically significant resource. We could call this Sustainable Steady State – Man not being silly. (I am avoiding here how to bring this about via societal controls, it’s not my aim.)

Choice 2: ACC-Sv1: Accelerative State V1: Accelerate the intake of resources through military conquest, innovation of techno-capital etc. (Accelerate the process). This of course increases both W(p) and W(c), which go on to further increase M(p). This means only one thing, a society that wishes to remain anabolic must expand its resource base at an ever-increasing rate to keep C(p) from dropping below M(p). If society fails to achieve this ever-increasing rate then it enters into contraction: nC(p) < M(p). Meaning capital cannot be maintained and is converted into waste, populations begin to decline, disintegration of social organizations, societal fragmentation and decentralization, loss of information. These societies can return to SSv1.1 if they bring d(R) back below r(R). But what is they do this…this: [d(R)/r(R) > 1]. That, right there, is the most simple way of explaining the majority of civilization’s problems, that means that M(p) exceeds C(p) and capital can no longer be maintained, resources deplete etc. This eventually results in the catabolic cycle of self-reinforcement in which C(p) stays below M(p) whilst both decline. C(p) approaches zero whilst capital is converted to waste.

(Once again, this is largely from John Michael Greer’s How Civilizations Fail: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse.)

And there you have it, the basics of collapse. That’s excluding the general ignorance, stupidity and arrogance of humanity and other societal defects, but by and large that’s the route in which we create our own demise. There’s of course other factors effected by us which I shall list a few of, but the theory of catabolic collapse is central to the Z/Acc debate in terms of accelerationist theory. The average time it takes for a society/civilization to collapse is 250 years by the way, so don’t fall into the trap of thinking you’re safe.

So what of Z/Acc here. I think it’s a fairly simple task to materially understand how stagnation will happen within a civilization now, however, does this have much to do with the temporal theory of acceleration? It certainly throws into the air questions with regards to the means of which capital wishes to propagate its longevity and continuation. Perhaps a hegemonic, global method of control simply isn’t appropriate. Ever feel like you’re in a giant test-kit for capital? Well, perhaps capital now wishes to downscale into a microcosm of intelligence wherein production is acceleration focused. The tendrils of future capital are hitting against unexpected d(R), fucking humans and their robotic Santa toys. [Systems of] Capital is generally ignorant of the finite. And so a proposal would be to retain humanity within smaller and smaller microcosms of M(p) as a means to have greater control over d(R) and W. Z/Acc is the reset button, except pressing it to completion takes roughly 250-1000 years.

The Myths We Tell Ourselves:

I wrote about this further in my post Greer’s Future, but in short:

However, there’s another very specific idea that invades Greer’s work consistently. Often directly, but more often it sits quietly at the sidelines, smirking at its own reality. And this is Greer’s almost a priori notion that civilizations collapse, end, stop-being etc. With Greer the possibility for anything to end is always possible. This seems quite obvious, right? Well, not so. People hate to think that even their most luxurious comforts – ones that have always been around – would cease to be. So why would they even start to believe in a world where the basics will become a struggle?

Also specific to the Greerian reality is the fact that semantically collapse is quite commonly mistaken for an instantaneous event. This is quite simply wrong, in fact, it’s so wrong it exists solely in the realms of escapism and quasi-romanticism. No wonder the amount of post-apocalyptic media has increased in recent years, I mean what other generation(s) yearn for a reset button more than those who’ve been promised so much and allowed so little. Media such as Fallout, Mad Max, The 100, The Walking Dead etc aren’t truly horror, not really, for the simply fact that humans are still around and not only are they doing fine, they’re actually doing quite well and in someways progressing in healthier directions that their previous societies. And so at heart all these programs, games etc. is – at the very least – optimism, but also a perception of time in relation to collapse which is simply wrong. We think of ‘collapse’ as the collapse of a table or chair, a quick successive tumble of parts, yet once that which is collapsing grows in complexity (a civilization for instance) then the process of collapse becomes far, far longer. Emphasis on process here, the process of collapse will see chunks of civilization fly of and attempt to be replaced or repaired in relation to their previous standard, slowly but surely everything sort of disintegrates at such a rate that those living within it only notice the stark difference in conditions years later.

The myth we tell ourselves is deeply routed in modes of binary thinking of black and white, wrong and right etc.. A mode of thinking that’s ever-growing in society. It’s the difference between apocalypse and SSv1 (Steady state society), we’re either fine, or it’s all over. We’re never simply descending into chaos, things never truly get worse it seems because we’re always replacing the ‘worse’, smothering it with some new form of innovation that makes it look better. The myth we tell ourselves in everyday life are along these lines:

“They’ll think of something…”

“The world’s fucked, everyone knows that, better to not think about it.”

“It wont be that bad…”

And on and on with your dull co-workers, the equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and shouting “La la la la la la!” whilst food prices rise, death tolls rise, roads aren’t repaired, certain trees and species die etc.

Here is a list of apocalyptic predictions. There’s something which connects all these in relation to their understanding of collapse and apocalypse. The date can be plotted on a chart, it’s an instantaneous event. That’s the myth. We’d love for that to happen. If everything changes all at once then we only have to deal with those consequences, not the ones we’re within right now. The inverse or this, is the myth of progress, which can aptly be assimilated onto Christian eschatology:

“Over the last three centuries or so, Christianity’s influence on the Western intellect has crumpled beneath the assaults of scientific materialism, but no mythology has yet succeeding in outing it from its place in the Western imagination. The result has been a flurry of attempts to rehash Christian myth under other, more materialistic names. The mythology of progress is itself one examples of this sort of secondhand theology. Marxism is another, and most of the more recent myths of apocalypse reworked the Christian narrative along the same lines that Marx did, swapping out the economic concepts Marx imported to the myth for some other set of ideas more appealing to them or more marketable to the public.” – Greer, The Long Descent

Peak Oil:

Peak oil is the theorized point in time when the maximum rate of extraction of petroleum is reached, after which it is expected to enter terminal decline. Peak oil theory is based on the observed rise, peak, fall, and depletion of aggregate production rate in oil fields over time. It is often confused with oil depletion; however, whereas depletion refers to a period of falling reserves and supply, peak oil refers to the point of maximum production. (Hubbert peak theory)

Z/Acc Externals I: Climate

Long Term Effects of Increased Carbon Dioxide. (I and II)

Planetary Vital Signs – NASA

Climate Change Summary – Guy McPherson

Collapse Data Cheat Sheet – Loki’s Revenge

Soil and Water Realities – Loki’s Revenge

Tech vs Climate Change – Yale Environment

The Myth of Solar Energy – Liam Scheff

Wind and Solar Will Save Us Delusion – Our Finite World

Renewable Energy Wont Save Us – Futurism

2018 Warmest Year on Record – Science

Renewable Delusion Lecture – Dr Vaclav Smil

Z/Acc Externals II: Attitude

Human Optimism Disallows the Reality of Apocalypse – Nature Neuroscience

The Myth of Progress – Do The Math

Extinction Anxiety – Carolyn Baker

The Telltale Signs of Imperial Decline – Charles Hugh Smith

Reality Denial and Optimism – Chris Hedges

The American Dream – Doomstead Diner

Overworked Peasants – more C(p) needed for M(p) – Business Insider

Z/Acc Externals III: Economics

Great Depression 2.0 – Press Herald

Global Bear Market 2019 – CNBC

Corporate Buybacks Feedback Loop – CNBC

Germany Recession – Business Insider

Paycheck-to-paycheck Living Increasingly Common – The Inquirer

£1.5 Trillion in Student Debt – Newsrep

Slow Growth China – The Guardian

UK Financial Crisis – The Week

Yield Curve First Inversion – Bloomberg

Price Rises in U.S. – France24

Z/Acc Reading List:

Fundamentals of Ecology – Eugene P. Odum (Or any basic textbook on ecology.)

The Limits to Growth – Dennis Meadows, Donella Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III

Overshoot – William R. Catton Jr.

The Decline of the West – Oswald Spengler

A Study of History (Abridged) – Arnold Toynbee

Where the Wasteland Ends – Theodore Roszak

Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush – John Michael Greer

The Long Descent

Dark Age America

Retro Future

The Collapse of Complex Societies – Joseph Tainter

Interview with Justin Murphy

By: mnold

31-07-2018

About, Accelerate

Embedded below is my conversation with Justin Murphy. We talked about Left, Right and Unconditional Accelerationism, Leftism, Patchwork, Blogging, Art and more. Enjoy.

An Atomist Reading of Accelerationism: The Machinic Clinamen

By: mnold

07-05-2018

Accelerate, Philosophy

We begin here with Lucretius, the Roman poet and philosopher, or more aptly poet-philosopher. A thinker whose work within physics, especially his Atomism can be described as Deleuzian, and thus you should know about it, as it’s in and of and with the future already. So here we have it –

– a laminar flow. A series or parallel lines running next to each other, put very simply, let’s make it clearer for you –

– now the lines or ‘the flow’ are/is heading downwards. This laminar flow, or laminar plane consists of a series of atomic threads or lines, each parallel to the next and entirely stable within the void, heading downwards on an/the ‘extreme descent’ eternally – all thanks to the law of the optimal path – now, think of this laminar plane as time, or as a temporal laminar plane and the resulting possible/potential shifts of the atomic threads as possible/potential alterations to the physical world…due to the fact time has been altered.

Now, let’s begin the exciting bit. What is called ‘the swerve’ or more academically the ‘clinamen‘:

When atoms move straight down through the void by their own weight, they deflect a bit in space at a quite uncertain time and in uncertain places, just enough that you could say that their motion has changed. But if they were not in the habit of swerving, they would all fall straight down through the depths of the void, like drops of rain, and no collision would occur, nor would any blow be produced among the atoms. In that case, nature would never have produced anything. – Lucretius, De rerum natura

So, that is, one of those atomic threads within the laminar flow is changed, altered, swerved etc. it is no longer parallel or in harmony or eternal with the rest of the threads, and as such a change within history has been made. One could think of the laminar flow as an extremely simplistic cybernetic circuit for the entirety of human history if they liked, it wouldn’t matter much, for an Accelerationist reading will bring our demise, so let’s begin.

Acceleration(ism) enters. And due to the very nature of the laminar flow the only way in which something can alter the flow itself is to enter it diagonally, for the flow is vertical. This diagonal movement made by Accelerationism – remember Accelerationism is synonymous with Capitalismism – is a temporal movement, a movement in time, and as this movement is not simply in-keeping with the eternal Sisyphean drudgery of those other parallel atomic threads one can begin to analyse its – this new diagonal line’s – end, for that which is changing the course of such eternal descending bliss must have way of conclusion or end. So one should assess Accelerationism’s approach to obstacles.

Well, what are Accelerationism’s obstacles? Literally that which could potentially hinder its self-fulfillment, which, due to its very nature is very, very few things. How do we assess its approach? Well we give an assessment of its/our current access, presence, absence, strength, weakness and availability of that which could either constrain or bolster its direction towards its end goal. Or more succinctly:

“How well is capital doing?”

“Help me! They’ve commodified my every thought!”

It’s doing well. So well in fact that it routinely surprises even the most Bear Grylls-esque Outside-investigators as to its methods of temporal self-fulfilment. Rarely do such temporal end goals exist in such clear cut ways, rarely is there such finality to a temporal movement. That’s because it’s not just one thread being pulled.

The diagonal alteration of the laminar flow by Accelerationism, or, the machinic-clinamen, is itself capital. Capital which is going to alter or ‘swerve’ each and every singular atomic flow it needs to as a means for its own machinically desired end. That is capital swerves the laminar plane hyper-diagonally into the temporal circuitry of a cybernetic market process which utilizes the entirety of ‘history’ (meaningless in context to the plane) and agency (also meaningless) as a means for its own self-fulfillment, its own immortality…its own becoming.

Welcome, one and all to a future already designed, the culmination of multiple perfectly machnically-swerved atomic threads that have always-already instigated their own birth. To say you’re a meat-puppet, that’s the understatement of eternity.

TL;DR: Capitalism(ism) isn’t just reaching into the future & past to control its own becoming, but is in fact taking control of the very physics of being as a means for its own becoming.

Extrapolating on the Accelerationist Ritual

By: mnold

11-04-2018

Accelerate, Philosophy

The Accelerationist (Acc) ritual is as follows: “Accelerate the process.” It’s best repeated at the end of a long, didactic blog post which alludes to multiple niche sources. The ritual in its usual form comes from Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, and is to be found at the end of a section titled ‘The Civilized Capitalist Machine’, which along with the earlier sections on ‘The Desiring-Machines’ are all must reads for anyone interested in Acc and the Acc-sphere. The ritual itself is often taken for granted. For we have all read vast amounts about ‘acceleration’ now, and so the ritual seems self-explanatory, yet it this so? Has not the latter part of the ritual, ‘the process’ been left alone, if not mistaken for acceleration itself. The ritual is to be found like so:

“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 seend anything yet..” (p276, Anti-Oedipus)

In relation to Anti-Oedipus this quote is – surprisingly – quite self-explanatory. That is, the Deleuzoguattarian ‘acceleration of process’ is the acceleration of the decoding and deterritorializing that is inherent within capitalism, to allow the markets and capitalism itself to continue its production of producers-of-production – roughly speaking. Yet what if one is to take a single step back and withdraw to the source of the ritual, to Nietzsche’s The Will to Power:

“The strong who are to come. In the past, it was only by a combination of necessity and chance that the conditions for the production of a stronger kind of man were occasionally realized. But now, we can understand and consciously choose them: we can create conditions under which such an elevation is possible.-” (p510, a898, The Will to Power)

Nietzsche here speaking of his rope, from animal to man to Superman, or perhaps merely a greater form of man as a means for the coming of the Superman, either way Nietzsche’s point of conscious choice and creation of conditions is in conflict with the supposed apolitical nature of Deleuze & Guattari’s ritual.

“So far, ‘education’ has sought to benefit society: not as much as possible for the sake of mankind’s future, but for that of present-day, established society. What was wanted were ‘tools’ for its use. But suppose the accumulated wealth of energy were greaterm we could contemplate the possibility of setting aside a certain amount of that for the purpose of investing, not in society, but in the future. The present form of society is undergoing such a powerful transformation that at some point it will no longer be able to exist for its own sake, but only as the instrument in the hands of a stronger race. The more the extent of this transformation is understood, the more urgent it will be to set such a task.” (ibid)

The quarrelsome education system stuck within its own contemporary loop, unable to set aside assets for the future, unable to allow itself to even attend the future, even in the most hopelessly meagre ideas. You’ll notice too that Nietzsche doesn’t talk of investing in a future society, but only future, for the ‘society’ of the future, (hopefully) inclusive of a greater form of man would be so different to contemporary society that taking such an investment trajectory would be futile.

“The progressive diminution of man is precisely what compels us to consider the cultivation of a stronger race: a race which would have a surplus of precisely that in which the diminished species had become weak and was growing weaker (will, responsibility, self-assurance, the ability to set goals for oneself). The means to accomplish this would be those which history teaches: isolation by virtue of the fact that one’s needs and interests are contrary to those which are usual nowadays; practice in the contrary value judgements; distance as pathos; a clear conscience about is today most belittled and forbidden.” (ibid)

This section actualizing a bastardized form wherein L/Acc & R/Acc are flattened and stripped down to something quite horrific. The remaining flattened entity is that which has drawn out the process of man’s emancipation via capitalist acceleration, yet has retained its trajectory atop convergent waves. The emancipation, self-actualization, will and weight of man utilizing the immanent force of right-accelerationist convergent waves as a means for its own ascension.

“That great process, the levelling of European man, is not to be retarded; it should even be accelerated.” (ibid)

Man must be consciously flattened, made horizontal.

“This levelled species requires a justification, once it has been attained; its justification is the service it provides to a superior, sovereign species who stands upon it and can arise and accomplish its tasks only upon this basis.” (ibid)

“only upon this basis.” as such the process must come prior, man must become levelled prior to anything, man as the actualizer of the superior is a notion that still stands whether we ‘accelerate’ or not. And so to accelerate without this process of the levelling of [European] man in place one could argue that man is merely letting the future take the wheel, allowing conclusionless convergent waves take hold, without the levelling of man we accelerate along reversed temporal ripples that are heading towards a non-event, towards 0 itself.

The process, with thanks to Deleuze & Guattari, has become overcomplicated, ‘the process’ in its conservative (Nietzschean) state is quite straightforward, it is the cultivation of “that in which the diminished species had become weak and was growing weaker (will, responsibility, self-assurance, the ability to set goals for oneself).” (ibid)

The levelling, the conscious choosing, the creation of conditions is a must. Acceleration without conditions is allowing humanity to wither within an entropic-feedback loop of its own despair (contemporary progress), until it eventually fades into nothingness, dragging the ritual with it. As such, Acceleration must have conditions, for if it doesn’t what is it other that dull, decadent nihilism?

On Left and Right Accelerationism

By: mnold

22-02-2018

Accelerate, Philosophy

Where one begins with Acceleration or Accelerationism (or Capitalismism) in the scholarly philosophical sense can not be from any centralized point; this rhizomatic point-of-origin is quite in-keeping with Accelerationist theory. One could begin from Marx’s Fragment on Machines, The Accelerationist Reader, Hyperstition, Nick Land’s Oeuvre, Deleuzeguattarian philosophy, late Nietzsche, CCRU or even niche Twitter subgroups (search-terms: u/acc, l/acc, r/acc, z/acc, #rhetttwitter & #cavetwitter) So where shall I begin, from the list aboves glaring lacuna…

I shall begin with a the MAP. Unfortunately, this MAP isn’t full of detailed schematics, measurements or routes, no. This MAP is in fact a manifesto, The Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics (MAP) If it were a map I’d argue that it’d be so dated in its approach to cartography that we’d be dealing with but a crayon drawing of robo-Marx pointing which direction to go in. So, why begin here as opposed to the other Acceleration labyrinth (Acc-Lab) entry points? The MAP is one of the few entry locations of the Acc-Lab that actually has a defined position which is relative to any agreement; thus far, the MAP Acc-Lab doorway is the only agreed upon entry-point which leads to any constructive discussion as to acceleration. Why is this? To the meat!

As I stated MAP declares a position, which is of/on the left. Their proposition in short is to accelerate technology as a means to emancipate the worker from the shackles of capitalism, the acceleration of technology as a utopian-accelerative gesture.

‘Work for work’s sake is a perversity and a constraint imposed upon humanity by capitalism’s ideology of the work ethic. What accelerationism seeks is to allow human potential to escape from the trap set for it by contemporary capitalism.’ – #Accelerationism: Remembering the Future

It is quite transparently a ‘Marxism for the 21st century’ (Isaac Camacho) and so one may wonder why anyone would take seriously such a proposition, the idea that post/after/beyond/through capitalism lies this Marxist utopia is deluded, capitalism has already subsumed Marxism and unless you wish to make the case that it still exists but as mere internal-cyst upon capitalism’ innards waiting for its day or rupture, then your argument comes to a halt rather sharply. Postcapitalism, if such a nauseating political reality could come into existence, would exist much akin to postmodernism, yearning to be free of its suffix-master, yet perpetually attached via an economic umbilical cord for stability.

Yet this idea of ‘postcapitalism’ allows us to view that which Acceleration is truly indebted to: time. Postcapitalism could only come into existence via the ability of future-construction, via the ability to construct the future: ‘24. The future needs to be constructed.’ – MAP.

‘The notion that the future is less ontologically settled than the past is less transcendentally unsustainable position, it’s a metaphysics of time in a strict critical sense and it’s convenient for political orientation but it’s a philosophically unsustainable commitment.’ – Nick Land

This idea of ‘construction’ is ontologically and temporally muddled, albeit wrong. MAP’s notion of construction implies both a retainment of agency (not surprising from a Marxist perspective), yet it also implies that history presents a choice, and that history is on a divergent wave as opposed to a convergent wave. The ripples move in reverse, back towards the ‘event’, the singularity; capitalism drags and draws the ‘past’ and the ‘now’ from its place in the future. A temporal lasso cuts through common notions of chronic-time and acts out its transcendent selection process. Acceleration is the struggle to keep up with the demands of the future.

If one is in doubt of this strange, outside, diagonal temporal process they may only look upon the influx of subcultures and movements indebted to a non-linear, anti-chronic or atypical theorizations of times: Cyberpunk, Cybergoth, Neoreaction, Archifuture, Retro-progressivism etc. Imminent examples of disorder within the supposedly (currently) ordered security system; the prediction market was reliant on an incorrect form of time and as such…we got a lot wrong. If one returns to the idea of time as a convergent wave, they find that of course prediction markets would be wrong, their predictions were blind darts thrown against the pull of the future.

Back to our entry-point. Why did we enter at L/Acc? Because (as is often the case) it is the left who imply, if not create the first point of reference upon the spectrum. So with an entry at L/Left we now (apparently) have a political left, a directional left, and a positional left, from the trajectory of the MAP one can now – with rough certainty – say their hand is to the Left wall of the Acc-Lab. So with the existence of a Left comes the implication and almost forced (unwarranted) creation of a right. For you cannot have left without the existence of a right, wherever it may lay, and whatever it may be. R/Acc is an inevitable semiotic effect from the coinage of L/Acc.

Can you hear that clicking, hissing and screeching in the distance? It’s the noise of a hundred shitposters frothing at the mouth at the prospect of R/Acc articulation.

R/Acc, that grand phantasm of accelerationist thought. It is easiest to begin from comparison. In the traditional sense the political spectrum has on its left Liberalism and Communism, and on its right Conservatism and Fascism. So where L/Acc see a constructed future once again pertaining to Marxist thought, R/Acc sees (amongst a few perceptions – Wait your turn!) the possibility of acceleration only existing with a reversion to some form of hierarchical structure; this is where we see the convergence of Neoreaction and R/Acc, both taking the blackpill in acceptance of deterritorialization as capitalism – ‘it sees capital’s oppressive reconfiguration of the social space as the inevitable price techno-industrial development.’ – So, Acc

More recently both ends of the spectrum have altered in mirrored ways (as they would). We have seen the left become increasingly more egalitarian, more inclusive and more tolerant, to the point of ignorance, frustration and delusion. What the Left wishes to tuck neatly under the rug and act as if it will simply disappear once/if technological emancipation is achieved, the right wishes to bring to the fore and accept as a means to ‘prove’ and foster the idea that either we need a reversion, or more recently ‘It’s too fucking late!’

R/Acc: An increasing proportion of the industrial surplus is being absorbed by the task of masking bio-social deterioration.

Z/Acc: Over 100% soon.

U/Acc: Oh c’mon.

L/Acc: Look, a squirrel! – Nick Land (Outsideness)

The discrepancies of an R/Acc definition come about precisely because in its origination it was anti-capitalism. To paraphrase Moldbug ‘Just because you’re no longer a red, doesn’t mean you have to become a blue.’. R/Acc were anti-capitalist, but they weren’t/aren’t those anti-capitalists, they can’t be, otherwise the spectrum just shot up its own arse. R/Acc’s form of anti-capitalism begins from the idea that (for R/Acc) capitalism and acceleration are synonymous, and thus, they are not anti-capitalism in the strict, empirical, political sense, no. They are anti-capitalism in the sense of understanding that capitalism’s ‘industrial surplus is being absorbed by the task of masking bio-social deterioration’ and as such this isn’t a convergent wave leading anywhere pleasant. But then again, who ever said the singularity was going to be pleasant?

If one is to refer to the root of Deleuze and Guattari’s now semi-famous ‘accelerationist passage’ one can find articulation. The root of the accelerationist ritual ‘Accelerate the process!’ (Anti-Oedipus) is of course to be found is the latter fragmented jottings of Nietzsche’s nachlass The Will to Power: ‘The levelling of the European man is the great process which cannot be obstructed; it should even be accelerated.’ What does this quote reveal to us of both L/Acc and R/Acc? It reveals priorities: L/Acc dumbfoundedly wishes to control the ritual process, whereas R/Acc are primarily focused on what the levelling does to European man. Or: It’s all well and good ‘levelling European man’ but if that process results in a dysgenic, IQ shredding, weak, slave-like mess then perhaps it’s best to question the method. (I would add here for those interested that Neoreaction focuses more on European man that levelling or its effects.)

R/Acc is L/Acc’s compensatory reterritorialized element, yet unlike the L/Acc R/Acc has not chained itself to archaic theory set in chronic time, and as such acts as a reterritorialization acting and moving in relation to L/Accs consistent compiling of ignorance. This would be my personal argument against the idea that R/Acc needs or has a consistent political position, R/Acc’s inherent understanding of agency within unhinged time allows them to acquire the blackpill-visors and metaphorically witness capital’s convergent lasso come forth. With L/Acc searching for the – supposed – true agent of acceleration exterior to capitalism, which in the view of R/Acc is capitalism itself. Thus the spectrum upon which both L and R/Acc coexist is one of ontology, wherein one side (L/Acc) promote an ontologically objective structure of time, with humanities agency at the wheel, and the other end (R/Acc) accepting the ontology of the future as a constant. R/Acc accept that capital is critique.

Thus the circuit diagram of both L/Acc and R/Acc remain the same, their ontology however, is entirely different. The circuit diagram itself is Acceleration pure.

R/Acc

Hyperstitional Brand Entities

By: mnold

18-06-2017

Accelerate, Ethereum, Uncategorized

HYPERSTITIONAL BRAND ENTITIES: WENDY’S IS NOT YOUR FRIEND.

“…the official Wendy’s Twitter account — an unexpected beacon of light in 2017 — has shown us that brands have the potential to do so much more.” – Mashable

Prior to the dawn of dark-cybernetic entities hell-bent on enslaving the human race, we are witnessing the rise of brands as entities. Abstract consumerist veils taking on personalities to shadow their inner hunger for capital. Twitter accounts controlled by workers, click-farmers and cyber-proles are becoming characters in an economic play, a production of which they have immediate control. The Wendy’s Twitter is not a beacon of light, in fact it’s the furthest from light, it is a dark accelerative force towards ‘brand as reality’.

Brands having personalities, or human characteristics is hardly a new idea: McDmconalds with it’s golden arches and – now somewhat stained – Ronald McDonald, Burger King with The King and it’s over-the-top naming devices and KFC with the Colonel. This however does continue into regular, non-sentient characteristics, such as ‘smoothness’ for body products, or ‘refreshing’ for beer etc. yet, until around 1-2 years ago, no brand had really come alive. The advent of ‘meme marketing’ will act as a potent catalyst in the accelerative process of brand hyperstition.

“hyperstitions act as catalysts, engendering further (and faster) change and subversion. Describing the effect of very real cultural anxieties about the future, hyperstitions refer to exponentially accelerating social transformations.

Hype actually makes things happen and uses belief as a positive power. Just because it’s not ‘real’ now, doesn’t mean it won’t be real at some point in the future. And once it’s real, in a sense, it’s always been” – Hyperstition

Wendy’s Twitter ‘sass’ and ‘personality’ acted as a sharp ‘relevance’ kick for other consumer brands, it put forth the question of their position in the current economy, how are they going to act…these other personalities? For them to retaliate is to accept their existence, speak and reply, or die.

For one thing, taking on board the idea of using memes and contemporary net-culture as a means of promoting your business/brand is a risky move, there has been numerous cases where brands have attempted to utilize a meme for brand advancement, only to be laughed, retweeted and quoted out of the room by a gaggle of millennials, ready and willing at a moments notice to ridicule an intrusion into their culture; a culture which by all accounts is excessively fast paced and fragile, a repeated image can last from hours to years, a saying or piece of slang used effectively could boost sales or merely get a snigger.

But what of this decision for other brands? Brands which had existed for years as ‘established’ professionals of the economy. The question put forth was whether or not big-business wanted to descend to the level of its consumer? Would it be wise for them to mingle into the crowd they advertised to and for. There seemed to be the act of stepping down from a pedestal. Yet this is entirely untrue. In their decision to reply the brands took up the trident of temporal awakening and bent it to their will, instead of death via cultural stasis within an ever accelerating structure, the entities decided to animate and take their place at the Twitter table.

Making the decision to reply is an irreversible step, the process has begun; classic ‘2-dimensional characters’ shall be no more, they offer nothing but an immovable script (stuck at some point in the 80’s) awakened brand-entities offer a consumerist friendship, a level of trust. Instead of organising a McDonald’s birthday party for ya boy’s 5th bday, why not just DM Ronald. M. at 3am in the midst of a tick-binge; publically call The Colonel a shit-eater after he delivers you a chicken-bucket with a piece missing; riff with Wendy till the early hours because the only semblance of warmth that exists in your life is that of your laptop screen.

“capitalism incarnates hyperstitional dynamics at an unprecedented and unsurpassable level of intensity, turning mundane economic ‘speculation’ into an effective world-historical force” – Nick Land

“illusions – if people believe in them -change the course of history.” – Fernández-Armesto, Civilizations

.@arb plz tell me you did this pic.twitter.com/S21oFOZwXk

— Katy Wellhousen (@KatyWellhousen) January 3, 2017

“What makes Brown’s responses so boss is the fact that they don’t sound robotic…the team creates personalized, thought-provokingly witty responses that sound like they came from your sassy best friend.” – Mashable

That first sentence in itself is terrifying enough, “they don’t sound robotic”, not that the 8 year old pig tailed girl was ever meant to be a robot, no, only that, one is conversing with a Twitter account, something has emerged, something has become real. People will say “Did you see Wendy’s on Twitter last night…damn.” Gone are the days of brand suspicion, the days of understanding that a company isn’t there for you, it’s there for you.

@Wendys what are you firing back https://t.co/dyVIEi6WcF

— Brittany Guernsey (@bguerns13) January 22, 2016

Wendy’s is allowing existence of other brands: Either come alive, or die in a regressive pit of 80’s slogans and non-immediacy. Wendy’s has tapped in to the main artery of the attention economy, immediate feedback from an abstract entity via your phone; thus one could begin to really feel as if it were a friend they were simply texting. The rise of brand-entities, public discussions between The King and Ronald, a bare-knuckle meme fight in a Little Chef carpark, Hardee’s blocks Wendy’s from its feed due to public humiliation, insult after insult, ‘burn’ after ‘burn’ all accumulating in a hyperstitional consumerist brand-entity arising from the past, where it has always been, and as such finds its assimilation into human society that much easier – “Wah you mea’ man, Wendy’s alway been aroun’!”

That’s her over yonder, where she resides, Wendy, queen of the Curve. The 8 year old auburn pig-tailed cyber-behemoth, she’s been around for centuries, a neolithic brand. A faint giggle clicks off the horizon as you pull your phone from your pocket, a dozen discussions amassed in seconds upon seconds on your feed, brands, apps, old friends, dead-brands, software, bots, all discussing the news: RATS HEAD FOUND IN BURGERJOINT the title says, pun after pun, quip after quip, the discussion rotates between brands, a cyber-dopamine addled fight for retweets and likes.

Let me repeat, Wendy is not your friend, Wendy’s Twitter page is not your friend, whether or not what is or is not controlling them is witty, it’s all programmed, whether it comes in an instant or not, it is lacking authenticity in every sense. Dragging itself from economic insecurity via a deconstruction of that which surrounds it; taking hold of cyber-culture and molding it towards a malicious end. An end from which comes the customer’s demise, you’re car will be making fun of you as drive down a state-sponsored highway, the date and time blocked from view…”Where shall we eat tonight hun?”

“I don’t know darling, somewhere that hasn’t publicly called me a cunt would be nice.”

Nick Land, CCRU, Accelerationism and Neoreaction – An Overview & Guide

By: mnold

01-06-2017

Accelerate, Neoreaction, Philosophy, politics, rhetttwitter

INTRODUCTION:

Firstly, why the hell am I writing ‘this’? There have been countless attempts in recent months at articles towards something like a ‘Who is Nick Land?’, ‘What is Accelerationism?’ or ‘What is Neoreaction?’ or short essays attempting at a general encapsulation of a man whose work, as far as I can see, exists purposely in a Pynchonian cyber-scattering. When one comes across a fresh piece of Landian theory, they become a momentary data-archaeologist, raking through the datacombs in the hope of finding a measly piece to this chaotic assemblage. So, why? Because scatterings aggravate me, especially when it comes to monetized repetition, articles repeating vague biographical ‘facts’ and tit-bits without any real relation to the theory and critiques Land has made; simple frustratingly transparent semi-hagiographic pieces largely in relation to the mythos of Land’s time at Warwick. So I felt, in a way, that there should be at least some attempt at a ‘piece’ which not only discussed Land himself – only when needs be – but also extrapolated as to why there is such a following. A place in which 3 key ‘theory’ components which are in way ‘linked’ can be found together. I must stress, this is not my attempt to lump any 1 of these things with another, no, only that when one comes across Land’s work they hear of Accelerationism, and following that Neoreaction, and not always in that order, think of this as a kind of beginner’s guide, or overview of 3 very eclectic and scattered ideas.

I already understand that this piece, article, essay, word-mash, is going to come across as a complete gushing for my admiration of Land’s work, which in itself will utilize many of the stylistic choices and theoretical devices employed by Land himself, hopefully by the end of this piece, the reader, in part, will understand why the work of Land (& the CCRU) is so infectious – whether maliciously viral or not – and why it finds its way seeping into the smallest of academic and creative pursuits and quandaries. Take this piece as assemblage of Land, CCRU and all that gravitates towards, a place on the internet where you can (hopefully) find all you need to guide you down each dirty ‘n clean alleyway à la Land.

And with regards to the Dark Enlightenment/Neoreaction section, if by now it’s clear, simply talking or writing about something does not mean an affiliation or support for that ‘thing’, however toxic people may find it.

Discussion ≠ Support.

Enjoy, or don’t.

BIOGRAPHICAL HISTORY:

“Academics’ lives are seldom interesting…What do you know about me, given that I believe in secrecy? … If I stick where I am, if I don’t travel around, like anyone else I make my inner journeys that I can only measure by my emotions, and express very obliquely and circuitously in what I write. … Arguments from one’s own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments.” – Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, pp. 11–12

Henrik Palmgren: “Introduce yourself to the audience a bit…”

Land: “Umm…well I mean…it’s hazy to me, so I think it will be hazy to other people.

For those familiar with Land the first quote by Deleuze is almost absurdly relevant. From my somewhat excessive research and reading into Land, one thing – amongst many – has become clear with relation to ‘biographies’, he’s not particularly interested in them, especially his own, what’s of importance is the work that came from that ‘era’ however trivia filled and ‘cool’ it was. That said this – sadly – is what interests some people – in part – about Nick Land.

And so: (all links are NON-referral)

Nick Land is an English philosopher and writer – Wikipedia.

1987-1998: Land lectures in Continental philosophy at Warwick university.

1992: The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism is published.

1995: Land becomes co-founder (along with Sadie Plant) of the Cybernetic Culture Research Institute (CCRU), a student-run collective unofficially ‘part’ of Warwick’s philosophy department.

1997: Plant leaves Warwick, as such Land becomes ‘leader’ of the CCRU.

1990’s: Land produces/publishes various short articles for & alongside the CCRU.

Unknown Year: Land collaborates on a text called Necrophysics with physicist Rhett Allain.

Unknown Year: Land moves to Shanghai

Unknown Year: Land becomes editor of Urbanatomy and teaches at the New Centre for Research & Practice.

Unknown Year: Land begins writing psychological horror.

2011: Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 is published.

2014: Templexity: Disordered Loops through Shanghai Time is published.

2014: Phyl-Undhu is published.

2015: Chasm is published.

Land’s two current blogs are: Urban Future 2.1 and Outside In, alongside his twitter: @Outsideness

Also a link to his old blog posts: Old Nick Stuff, Hyperstition and CCRU

And I’ll leave this here as a sort of footnote, for those who can be bothered with the ‘cool’ biog-elements.

EARLY-LANDIAN PHILOSOPHY:

I shall try give a brief overview of elements of Landian philosophy, however, to succinctly explain ‘it’ in its entirety within say, 10,000 words would be difficult. Also, when talking about Land’s older word (pre-Shanghai) it’s important to keep this quote from the man himself in mind:

It’s another life; I have nothing to say about it – I don’t even remember writing half of those things … – An Experiment in Inhumanism, Robin Mackay

The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism is Land’s only full length academic book, and more than likely be will be his last, due to his distain with Western academia, whether or not there will be more theory-fiction, who knows?

The book itself is unlike any other ‘commentary on another’s work’ I’ve read, it’s far more lucid, much like a set of meditations on Kant, Bataille, Nietzsche, Marx and Schopenhauer, as opposed to a rigorous in-depth ‘critical’ analysis of Bataille’s work.

Being Sufficiently does a great job overviewing the work.

“Ever since it became theoretically evident that our precious personal identities were just brand-tags for trading crumbs of labour-power on the libidino-economic junk circuit, the vestiges of authorial theatricality wear thinner” – Land, Thirst, Preface XIII

“There is one simple criterion of taste in philosophy: that one avoid the vulgarity of anthropomorphism. It is by failing here that one comes to side with cages. The specifics follow straightforwardly:

“1. Thoroughgoing dehumanization of nature, involving the uttermost impersonalism in the explanation of natural forces, and vigorously atheological cosmology. No residue of prayer. An instinctive fastidiousness in respect to all the traces of human personality, and the treatment of such as the excrement of matter; as its most ignoble part, its gutter…

2. Ruthless fatalism. No space for decisions, responsibilities, actions, intentions. Any appeal to notions of human freedom discredits a philosopher beyond amelioration.

3. Hence absence of all moralizing, even the crispest, most Aristotelian. The penchant for correction, let alone vengefulness, pins one in the shallows.

4. Contempt for common evaluations; one should even take care to avoid straying accidentally into the right. Even to be an enemy is too comforting; one must be an alien, a beast. Nothing is more absurd than a philosopher seeking to be liked.” – Land, Thirst, Preface XX

Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 begins with Land’s more formal essays on Kant, Heidegger and Nietzsche, the kind of essay you would find from an extremely gifted and philosophically energetic and original thinker, this aside, these essays are, in terms of Landianism, components of an academic system and as such are a falling back into the security of the institution. From here there is a set of 4 essays (Spirit and Teeth through to Making it with Death), each of which are still within academic jurisdiction, yet one feels they are beginning to push away from the ‘accepted’.

From here on out in Fanged Noumena we are reading the Land we’ve heard about, the central section of the text I would personally say is the most theoretically important in terms of Landianism, spanning from Circuitries through to the famous Meltdown, we feel Land is working with the philosophical intensity of a madman, a worry begins to build during reading, as one realises what it must have been like to have this kind of scheme flowing 24/7, a hypnotic whirlwind of anti-humanism, cybernetic-theory, Gibson-esque language, post-structuralism, nihilism, and a general sense that at any second something has to give. Which, in a way, during the last sections of the text it does.

“Level 1, or world-space, is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-configured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly. Garbage time is running out.

Can what is playing you make it to Level 2?” – Fanged Noumena (Blurb)

From A zIIgothIc–==X=coDA==–(CookIng–lobsteRs– wIth–jAke–AnD–DInos) through to Tic-talk something has given way in the author, they’ve entered into and are writing from a plane of existence which is very difficult for the reader to attend, there’s a level of separation which in itself addresses in some ways why the ‘Human Security System’ the Land of the 90’s sought to leave/destroy is actually beneficial at times.

“Whenever its name has been anything but a jest, philosophy has been haunted by a subterranean question: What if knowledge were a means to deepen unknowing?”

CCRU

As I’ve stated in the BIO section, CCRU stands for Cybernetic Culture Research Institute, a collective, that:

‘does not, has not, and will never exist‘.”

A collective whose interests spanned a broad range: Continental philosophy, post-structuralism, cybernetics, science-fiction, rave culture, jungle music, occultism, cyber-philosophy & culture, AI, accelerationism, time-theory, theory-fiction, Lemurian-studies, cryptography, Marxism, capitalism, Afro-futurism, Indo-futurism, Sino-futurism, & more.

Here’s a the CCRU Glossary – You’ll need it.

I have to admit at this juncture – and this will most likely be the case for much of this piece – that the CCRU is difficult to ‘sum-up’, and near impossible to begin describing without using source material from the Unit itself:

“Ccru retrochronically triggers itself from October 1995, using a UK University as a temporary habitat. Its emergence is sequenced and accelerated by a series of singularities” – CCRU, Communique One,

“Many members of the Ccru had fled cultural studies, disgusted by its authoritarian prejudices, its love of ideology, and pompous desire to ‘represent the other’ or speak on behalf of the oppressed. To us, it never seemed that the real articulacy of the left academic elites was in any way superior to the modes of popular cultural expression which were either ignored or treated as raw material to be probed for a ‘true’ (ie ideological) meaning by white middle-class intellectuals.

These events sought to reinforce and energize the interrelations between elements of theoretical research and popular culture.

Ccru is an ongoing experiment in collectivity, collective production, anonymity, and masks, dedicated to practically dismantling standard models of social existence, by pursuing ethics in the spinozistic sense (experimental production of collective bodies).“- CCRU, Communique Two,

“Still nominally affiliated to the famously post-structuralist Philosophy Department of Warwick University, England, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit is a rogue unit. It’s the academic equivalent of Kurtz: the general in Apocalypse Now who used unorthodox methods to achieve superior results compared with the tradition-bound US military. Blurring the borders between traditional scholarship, cyberpunk sci-fi and music journalism, the CRRU are striving to achieve a kind of nomadic thought that to use the Deleuze & Guattari term—“deterritorializes” itself every which way: theory melded with fiction, philosophy cross-contaminated by natural sciences (neurology, bacteriology, thermodynamics, metallurgy, chaos and complexity theory, connectionism), academic writing that aspires to the future-shock intensity of jungle and other forms of post-rave music.” – Renegade Academia, Simon Reynolds. (As a matter of fact the Renegade Academia article is probably the most succinct when it comes to describing CCRU.)

“Their unattributable, arcane writings, telling of strange inhuman entities, hyperstitional personages and syncretic pantheons, are uniquely disturbing and compelling: it is as if the group had collectively accessed hitherto undiscovered realms of bizarre archetypes. They successfully smeared the line between the real and what they called the ‘hyperstitional’: fictions that make themselves real through collective practice.” – An Experiment in Inhumanism, Robin Mackay

So, what the fuck is or…was the CCRU? I guess in ‘layman’s’ terms it was a collective that wanted to push the boundaries of philosophy and theory, a collective who felt suffocated and constrained by the over-bearing heavily – being an understatement – left-wing leaning academic system. A group who sought to utilize methods, devices, texts and ‘thinkers, whom/which otherwise would be deemed weird, non-professional, unquantifiable, ‘esoteric’ and not fit for proper academic theorizing/essay production.

(Links to most relevant page – directly to their work)

The list below is but a few of the members of CCRU, the selection is of those who are more prolific, or perhaps simply standing a little more in the spotlight, that said, a trip down any one of these hyperlink-holes will shed some (dark) light on the ‘point’ of CCRU.

This mythological somewhat cult-like group is inclusive of and affiliated with:

Jake and Dinos Chapman

0[rphan]d[rift>]

“He regarded the degeneration of his ‘breakthrough’ into a ‘breakdown’ as ultimate and humiliating proof of the incapacity of the human to escape the ‘headcase,’ the prison of the personal self. Wretchedly, for Land, it was no longer possible to tell whether his speculative epiphanies had been (as he had believed at the height of his delirium) glimmers of access to the transcendental – or just the pathetic derangements of a psyche pushed to the derisory limits of its tolerance. The experiment was over.

When I contacted Land about the republication of his works, he did not protest, but had nothing to add: It’s another life; I have nothing to say about it – I don’t even remember writing half of those things … I don’t want to get into retrospectively condemning my ancient work – I think it’s best to gently back off. It belongs in the clawed embrace of the undead amphetamine god.”

– An Experiment in Inhumanism, Robin Mackay

One commented (on Twitter) has made it clear that leaving out Gnon was a grave error, I feel this is the most applicable place to put ‘Gnon’, it especially needs to be put prior to NRx.

Land’s own short write up of what Gnon is can be found here: http://www.xenosystems.net/the-cult-of-gnon/

Extracts from the piece:

“If The Arbiter of the Universe merits abbreviation (“TAofU”), Nature or Nature’s God has a much greater case. A propeller escapes awkwardness, and singularity compacts its invocation. NoNG, Nong, No — surely, no. These terms tilt into NoNGod and precipitate a decision. The ‘God of Nature or (perhaps simply) Nature’ is Gnon, whose Name is the abyss of unknowing (epoche), necessarily tolerated in the acceptance of Reality.”

“Gnon is no less than reality, whatever else is believed. Whatever is suspended now, without delay, is Gnon. Whatever cannot be decided yet, even as reality happens, is Gnon. If there is a God, Gnon nicknames him. If not, Gnon designates whatever the ‘not’ is. Gnon is the Vast Abrupt, and the crossing. Gnon is the Great Propeller.”

ACCELERATIONISM

Both the left and right accelerationist thought can be tracked back to the work of Marx, Nietzsche, Land and the CCRU. That’s as much of history of accelerationism really needs, it wouldn’t be in-keeping to drudge up the past every 5 minutes now, would it? (But that’s the way things are…now.)

So, what is accelerationism, that elusive political and social ‘theory’ which has been picked up by the likes of The Guardian and the New Statesmen, yet still comes across as a little vague.

To put accelerationism into a sentence:

“‘accelerationism’ is the idea that the only way out is through”. – Steven Shapiro.

Capitalism isn’t exactly working and there’s no going back, so what can we do?

“Accelerate the process” – Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p260.

“if capitalism generates its own forces of dissolution then the necessity is to radicalise capitalism itself: the worse the better. We can call these positions accelerationist.” – accelerationism, Benjamin Noys

and Noys 3 examples of accelerationism:

Behaviourism is a psychology which begins with the needs of commodity production in order to develop methods with which to influence buyers, i.e., it is an active psychology, progressive and revolutionizing kathode (Kathoxen). In keeping with its capitalist function, it has its limits (the reflexes are biological; only in a few Chaplin films are they already social). Here, too, the path leads only over the dead body of capitalism, but here, too, this is a good path. – Brecht

There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present-day society: to retreat ahead of it.
– Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes (1973)

One must push through to the other side rather than drag one’s heels.
– The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, Galloway & Thacker (2007)

“Accelerationists argue that technology, particularly computer technology, and capitalism, particularly the most aggressive, global variety, should be massively sped up and intensified – either because this is the best way forward for humanity, or because there is no alternative. Accelerationists favour automation. They favour the further merging of the digital and the human. They often favour the deregulation of business, and drastically scaled-back government. They believe that people should stop deluding themselves that economic and technological progress can be controlled. They often believe that social and political upheaval has a value in itself.

Accelerationism, therefore, goes against conservatism, traditional socialism, social democracy, environmentalism, protectionism, populism, nationalism, localism and all the other ideologies that have sought to moderate or reverse the already hugely disruptive, seemingly runaway pace of change in the modern world.” – Accelerationism, Andy Beckett

“For Landian Accelerationism, capitalism is a machinic, ‘techonomic’ (technological-economic) explosion, whose self-reinforcing, self-excitatory mechanism is best modelled as a runaway cybernetic feedback loop (it should be said that if you’re a cyberneticist, everything is best modelled as a feedback loop). This just means that the immanent dynamics of capital push necessarily towards the ever-greater expansion of capital – Marx’s M-C-M’ circuit is cybernetic runaway par excellence – and immanent within that expansion is a necessary co-dependence of technological and economic advance, including ever-increasing powers of abstraction and computation. As ‘capital’ expands in both space and time (imperialism, futures’ markets), the market, understood in its Misesian sense as catallactic, itself becomes a sort of distributed computer for the calculation of prices, spontaneously generating collective intelligence far in excess of what humans are consciously capable of mastering. Thus, the market an sich is a form of ‘artificial superintelligence’ long before the computer is even invented. This is, in part, what Land means by the “teleological identity of capitalism and artificial intelligence.”- Accelerationism, Left and Right, Park Macdougald

LEFT-ACCELERATIONISM (L/Acc):

Left-Accelerationism wants to accelerate technology for the benefit of mankind, beyond the oppressive nature of capitalism, to utilize modern technology as a means of emancipating man from a life of work, to use technology in a socially beneficial way (automation etc.)

Probably the most read and prolific text with regards to accelerationism is Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek’s #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics.

Also: #Accelerate. The Accelerationist Reader

“[Inventing the Future by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams] consistently refers to its future not as communism, but “postcapitalism.” It’s a world without work, but also without the commons. “The theory of the Communists,” write Marx and Engels, “may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” But here, private property remains untouched. The productive apparatuses are to be fully automated, removing workers as much as possible from every stage of the production process: who, then, will own them? Who will own the commodities that these apparatuses produce? And if humanity is unburdened from the need to work and left to produce freely in the pursuit of its own self-expression, who will own that? Without anything to oppose bourgeois property, the result could be fully monstrous: a bloated, gluttonous ruling class engaged in limitless production, and recapturing any losses when the new peons come to spend their universal basic pittance. The propertied classes would fuse with an automaton that requires no human parts except for ownership to form a single apparatus; Utopia as a cyborg dictatorship.

This future has, in fact, already been described – it’s E.M. Forster’s 1909 science-fiction story The Machine Stops. Here, all of humanity lives in tiny cells within the body of the vast subterranean Machine. The Machine produces all their consumer goods, it provides them with anything they might want or need at a moment’s notice, it speaks to them, and allows them to speak to each other through video-messaging. People tend not to leave their cells; it’s not forbidden, but it’s certainly not encouraged. Full automation. Universal basic income. A networked society. In the end the Machine starts to slowly disintegrate. Billions die, and Forster, who had something of a reactionary streak, can only see this as a good thing. Who owns the Machine? The Machine does.” – The Future Has Already Happened, Sam Kriss

“Work for work’s sake is a perversity and a constraint imposed upon humanity by capitalism’s ideology of the work ethic. What accelerationism seeks is to allow human potential to escape from the trap set for it by contemporary capitalism.” – #Accelerationism: Remembering the Future, Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams and Armen Avanessian

“But politics is not all hopeless. Left Accelerationism is an alternative, and it’s the idea that the only way out of multinational late capitalism is through it. Capitalism has one direction at this point and that’s collapse. Either it collapses into socialism or fascism, but it’ll collapse. Technological growth is a consequence of capitalism and technology. It can and should be repurposed. Left acceleration anticipates this collapse and aims to utilize technology to not only nudge the collapse Leftward, but to seize control via a counter-hegemony symmetrical to right populism. Marxism for the 21st century is nothing if not left Accelelerationism.” – Nick Land & Accelerationism, Isaac Camacho

RIGHT-ACCELERATIONISM (R/Acc):

“Right-accelerationism has converged with neoreaction precisely because it identifies the deterritorialising force with capitalism itself: it sees itself as biting the bullet, and claiming that if we want to accept the liberating alienation of capitalism we also need to accept an inevitable return to the familiar feudal structures it fleetingly displaced. Whereas classical fascism used techno-capitalism as a means to the end of anti-modernism, neoreaction uses anti-modernism as a means to the end of techno-capitalism. This is why it is sillier than fascism in my opinion – because it has sacrificed whatever liberating force it initially ascribed to capitalist alienation upon the atavistic altar of feudal domination. It is the only strand of accelerationist thought that could be said to read the above paragraph and find something worth accelerating, at least insofar as it sees capital’s oppressive reconfiguration of the social space as the inevitable price techno-industrial development.” – So, Accelerationism, what’s all that about?

“Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic desire remorselessly stripped of all Bergsonian vitalism, and made backwards-compatible with Freud’s death drive and Schopenhauer’s Will. The Hegelian-Marxist motor of history is then transplanted into this pulsional nihilism: the idiotic autonomic Will no longer circulating idiotically on the spot, but upgraded into a drive, and guided by a quasi-teleological artificial intelligence attractor that draws terrestrial history over a series of intensive thresholds that have no eschatological point of consummation, and that reach empirical termination only contingently if and when its material substrate burns out. This is Hegelian-Marxist historical materialism inverted: Capital will not be ultimately unmasked as exploited labour power; rather, humans are the meat puppet of Capital, their identities and self-understandings are simulations that can and will ultimately be sloughed off.”- Mark Fisher

“Chalmers says there are four options for us in a post-singularity world: extinction, isolation, inferiority, and integration.

The first option is undesirable. The second option would keep us isolated from the AI, a kind of technological isolationism in which one world is blind to progress in the other. The third option may be infeasible because an AI++ would operate so much faster than us that inferiority is only a blink of time on the way to extinction.

For the fourth option to work, we would need to become superintelligent machines ourselves. One path to this mind be mind uploading, which comes in several varieties and has implications for our notions of consciousness and personal identity that Chalmers discusses but I will not.” – The Singularity

The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis – David Chalmers

UNCONDITIONAL ACCELERATIONISM (U/Acc):

Unconditional accelerationism begins with a renunciation of the retrograde politicisation to which accelerationism has fallen subject. It denounces the tedious political forms and utopian humanist fantasies of the self-titled left-accelerationists, their high-modernist pretence to control over the uncontrollable. That Srnicek and Williams identify Land’s work as pointing merely to an indefinite steady state of ‘neoliberalism’ betrays the radical limitations of their conceptual universe. The triumphal march of capital does not begin and end with a historically limited human ideology.

Unconditional accelerationism rejects simultaneously the right-accelerationists’ Yudkowskian concern with control and evaluation, with shaping the explosion of modernity, with guaranteeing its heterogeneity, with exploring the possibilities of a supposedly ever-improving transhumanism. The aggregate improvement of humanity’s condition is, to be sure, a fact to which the traditional left seems incapable of responding. But beyond the nostrums of race and nation, the right-accelerationists seem all too anxious over the tearing-apart of humanity that this process has increasingly entailed. Despite their claim to a radical and ‘dark’ identity with acceleration, they model with bureaucratic pedantry forms of government within which they hope the explosion can be moulded and recuperated.

Against all this the unconditional accelerationist celebrates and intensifies the fire of modernity as a whole: both the flows of capital that compress the world ever tighter in a liquid despotism of the machine that is remodelling and resequencing humanity, and the flows of social cybernetics that are overwhelming political institutions, turning despite themselves towards terminal delirium. In the West, it is Frankenstein that constitutes the figure determining modernity’s course: the tool that overthrows its master. Trade. Social media. Artificial intelligence. In cybernetic modernity the story is repeated over and again. Unconditional accelerationism identifies with this process of overthrow in its kaleidoscopic multiplicity. System disease. Weaponised nihilism. K-insurgency. – Acceleration without conditions, Vincent Garton

REAL LEFT ACCELERATIONISM:

The distance ‘to’ communism and towards the creation of the material basis for communism can be shortened by means of accelerating capitalism. Capitalism blinded by its insatiable hunger for self-expansion doesn’t produce with living conditions of the producers in mind, as such, taking reference from Marx’s Capital, Jehu’s R-L/Acc is a utilization of capital’s blind self-acceleration towards an abrupt ulterior (communism), the material basis of which is slowly (unknowingly) built during the accelerative process.

“Of course, capitalism does not intentionally lay the material basis for communism, but the creation of the material basis for communism is the necessary result of capital’s incessant revolutionizing of the forces of production of material wealth. Communism, Marx argues, is the necessary, though unintended, by-product of capital’s own relentless self-expansion.

Even if we assume that capitalism creates the material basis for communism, this does not imply the process itself can be sped up. What is it about the unconscious manner capitalism creates the material basis for communism that makes an accelerationist program possible?” – Making a Marxian labor theory case for an accelerationist strategy, Jehu

“The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself. It is that capital and its self-expansion appear as the starting and the closing point, the motive and the purpose of production; that production is only production for capital and not vice versa, the means of production are not mere means for a constant expansion of the living process of the society of producers.” – Capital, Karl Marx

“According to Marx, the limited aim of capitalist accumulation is itself a barrier to the completion of its historical mission to create the material basis for communism — and this requires an important caveat: Capital is only concerned about its self-expansion and nothing we do can alter this essential character. While capital is creating the material basis for communism, it does this in a self-contradictory way as the blind working of the laws inherent to the mode of production.

The case for intervention is the blind, unconscious character of capitalist accumulation itself.

Marx explains what happened when England introduced a limit on the duration of the working day that had the effect of limiting the aggregate duration of both paid and unpaid hours of labor: Capital immediately went to work on means to circumvent this limit by intensifying the exploitation of wage labor within the new shorter work day.

These new means of evading the cap on aggregate labor time included new technologies, more advanced science, increasing efficiency of labor time and materials, new organization. The shortening of the labor day also facilitated this intensification because the workers could labor more intensely in shorter bursts. As a result of the shortened working day, economic expansion, i.e., capitalist accumulation rose five-fold.” – Making a Marxian labor theory case for an accelerationist strategy, Jehu

ACC/EXTRA:

Meltdown – Nick Land

Cyberpositive – Sadie Plant and Nick Land

LA 2019: Demopathy and Xenogenesis – Iain Hamilton Grant

Swarmachines – CCRU

Nowhere fast? A brief critique of the Accelerationist Manifesto – J D Taylor

Some Reflections on the #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO – Antonio Negri

A Quick and Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism – Nick Land

Fragments on Machines – Karl Marx

#rhetttwitter

DARK-ENLIGHTENMENT, NEOREACTION (NRx):

We’ve been attempting to re-order society on the basis of equality for a very long time, we’ve been trying to make everybody and everything equal as best we can, we’ve noticed unjust and unfair systems and have tried are damned best to work them through and make everything ‘right’. It hasn’t worked, why? People just don’t want to cooperate; our attempts at making life better for people via utilization of modern scientific and technologic innovations have failed miserably. Why is this? Well, humans are far more complex than any seemingly transparent equality system we conjure up. Our inability as the human-race to not fit in means any machinery or processes we create, which in their creation are ‘tight’ and intricate, eventually end up being bastardised towards our lack of complacency. The majority of systems have ignored Hobbes and have completely forgotten that man is animal and is constantly competing for power, influence, wealth and (now) fame. Limitations merely create competition as opposed to equality, the stakes get higher and higher, the tension builds until the split becomes a 5/95.

People have been lured in by quasi-innovation, their lives have become ‘better’ in the most comfortable ways, better quality mattresses, attainable food 24/7, high-fructose, MSG-pump, infantile knowledge sources that are easily digestible, maddeningly large amounts of high-end entertainment, a catastrophic amount of complex escapist systems and structures, all this innovation makes them feel as if their lives are going exactly as they should be, and that everything they need they have, whereas, the matter of fact is, this material camouflage only acts a defence mechanism against a failing, deteriorating and generally incapable government.

As far as where to begin with Neoreaction, I personally would recommend listening to the first hour of Nick Land’s recent interview with Red Ice Radio. It’s definitely one of the more accessible sources, and it means you can get to grips with a vast amount of material in a short time.

“Ultimately, however, if after all these centuries of trying to improve society based on abstract ideas of justice have only made life worse than it would have been under pre-Enlightenment social systems, the time has come to simply give up the whole project and revert to traditional forms whose basis we might not be able to establish rationally, but which have the evidence of history to support them.” – Introduction to Neoreaction

Welcome to the “Dark Enlightenment”: We are unequal and Western Civ is Unique and impossible to replicate.

Western civ is the product of individualistic aristocratic egalitarianism caused by indo european battle tactics learned as pastoral radiers. Objectivity, debate and science, and the unique western solution to the problems of politics and market are the product of the need to obtain consent from other peers, rather than obey a chosen leader. – Welcome a New Member

The Dark Enlightenment – Nick Land

“Neo-reactionaries head for the exit.”

“…winning elections is overwhelmingly a matter of vote buying, and society’s informational organs (education and media) are no more resistant to bribery than the electorate, a thrifty politician is simply an incompetent politician, and the democratic variant of Darwinism quickly eliminates such misfits from the gene pool.”

“Where the progressive enlightenment sees political ideals, the dark enlightenment sees appetites.”

“As the democratic virus burns through society, painstakingly accumulated habits and attitudes of forward-thinking, prudential, human and industrial investment, are replaced by a sterile, orgiastic consumerism, financial incontinence, and a ‘reality television’ political circus. “

“By cropping out all high-frequency feedback mechanisms (such as market signals), and replacing them with sluggish, infra-red loops that pass through a centralized forum of ‘general will’, a radically democratized society insulates parasitism from what it does, transforming local, painfully dysfunctional, intolerable, and thus urgently corrected behavior patterns into global, numbed, and chronic socio-political pathologies. “

“Once it is accepted universally, or, speaking more practically, by all social forces wielding significant cultural power, that intolerance is intolerable, political authority has legitimated anything and everything convenient to itself, without restraint. “

“Firstly, the crime is augmented by a purely ideational, ideological, or even ‘spiritual’ element, attesting not only to a violation of civilized conduct, but also to a heretical intention. This facilitates the complete abstraction of hate from criminality, whereupon it takes the form of ‘hate-speech’ or simply ‘hate’ (which is always to be contrasted with the ‘passion’, ‘outrage’, or righteous ‘anger’ represented by critical, controversial, or merely abusive language directed against unprotected groups, social categories, or individuals). ‘Hate’ is an offense against the Cathedral itself, a refusal of its spiritual guidance, and a mental act of defiance against the manifest religious destiny of the world.”

“Secondly, and relatedly, ‘hate’ is deliberately and even strategically asymmetrical in respect to the equilibrium political polarity of advanced democratic societies. Between the relentless march of progress and the ineffective grouching of conservatism it does not vacillate. As we have seen, only the right can ‘hate’. As the doxological immunity system of ‘hate’ suppression is consolidated within elite educational and media systems, the highly selective distribution of protections ensures that ‘discourse’ – especially empowered discourse – is ratcheted consistently to the left, which is to say, in the direction of an ever more comprehensively radicalized Universalism. The morbidity of this trend is extreme.”

“At its most abstract and all-encompassing, the liberal-progressive racial dialectic abolishes its outside, along with any possibility of principled consistency. It asserts — at one and the same time — that race does not exist, and that its socially-constructed pseudo-existence is an instrument of inter-racial violence.”

Above quotes from: The Dark Enlightenment.

Another key reactionary is Mencius Moldbug who’s archived blog Unqualified Reservations displayed a ferocious appetite directed at underpinning and explaining contemporary political, technological and social problems.

“The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology.”

“In my experience, most sensible people consider themselves “moderate,” “centrist,” “independent,” “unideological,” “pragmatic,” “apolitical,” etc. Considering the vast tragedies wrought by 20th-century politics, this attitude is quite understandable. It is also, in my opinion, responsible for most of the death and destruction in the world today…”

“…the problem with moderation is that the “center” is not fixed. It moves. And since it moves, and people being people, people will try to move it. This creates an incentive for violence – something we formalists try to avoid.”

“Replacing your own ideology is a lot like do-it-yourself brain surgery. It requires patience, tolerance, a high pain threshold, and very steady hands…”

…There is no point in starting this messy experiment only to install some other ideology that’s the way it is just because someone said so. Formalism, as we’ll see, is an ideology designed by geeks for other geeks. It’s not a kit. It doesn’t come with batteries. You can’t just pop it in. At best, it’s a rough starting point to help you build your own DIY ideology. If you’re not comfortable working with a table saw, an oscilloscope and an autoclave, formalism is not for you.” – Formalist Manifesto

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”- The Education of a Libertarian

Neoreactionary Movement – Rational Wiki

Geeks For Monarchy: Rise of the Neoreactionaries – Klint Finley

Dark Enlightenment Reading List

Social Matter – Contains a weekly ‘This Week in Reaction’

Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous Planet Sized Nutshell

The Dark Enlightenment for Newbies

Moldbug’s Gentle Introduction

Moldbug’s Open Letter