I think I'd like to start off by saying that accelerationism is not a doctrinal position and I'm not going to define it. I seem to have an unfortunate tendency to create isms with dismal consequences. So just to say from the very start that in a sense accelerationism is just a set of problems around which many thinkers coming from very different backgrounds are kind of building a platform for thinking about the future, for thinking about what a politics that engages with the future could be, a politics which doesn't look backwards and which engages fully with the complexity of contemporary capitalism rather than simply decrying it.
And there are many kind of bones of contention within that movement, if we can call it a movement, and many different positions. So the best I can do is to direct you to the book, which also tries to kind of build a genealogy of the concept of accelerationism, where it arises right from the end of the 19th century through to the French philosophy of the 70s, a certain group amongst which Nick Land in the 90s in the UK, all the way through to the contemporary thinkers. and Ray's essay I think I chose obviously not necessarily for its reader friendliness and I apologise to those of you who found that it was kind of there was too much philosophical jargon but in a sense precisely because of that
because it links the political question of accelerationism to its kind of fundamental philosophical stakes if you like and hopefully even through the difficult language for for outsiders, you will have recognised some of the kind of fundamental problems that Brassier is trying to put forward in this piece. I guess the central one of which is that the claim that what we are, what humans are, can never be affected by what we do or what we make. And this is a claim that in a sense has been a central tenet of 20th century
philosophy. And it involves a form of transcendence. That is the idea that in some sense what we are transcends what we do and that the two can never be cross-contaminated. What is transcendence in philosophy? Transcendence is basically prophylaxis. It's a containment, a strategy of containment or a defence against contamination. It's a form of policing. So the best cultural figure of this is the Voigt-Kampf test in the film Blade Runner, where the replicants who are androids who have been engineered to be so close to humans
that they can't be identified, are brought in and tested periodically to test their responses and see if they're crossing the line and becoming too human and they have human emotional responses. Because if that happened, if that line was crossed, then we really would be in a territory where we no longer knew the difference and there would be a kind of irreversible contamination and indeed, as the film suggests, a crossbreeding between the maid and the human being. that made it. So this question of the transcendence of the human really comes from a philosophical tradition that begins with Kant, Immanuel Kant, in the 18th century. And what did Kant
want to do? He wanted to delineate the conditions of our experience. How is it that we're able to have experience? What gives our experience its coherence? And above all, what makes it possible for us to have scientific cognition, scientific knowledge? Why is it possible for us as finite beings, which manifestly we are, we don't have access like the mind of God intuitively to everything in the world, so we're finite, and yet we seem to be able to make statements, and particularly in the physical sciences, which are universally applicable. We can formulate laws which apply wherever we test them out. So we seem to be able to say something about experience that goes beyond the limits of our own individual experience.
And so Kant's strategy for tackling this question is essentially to turn philosophy into another form of science, the science of the conditions of experience. And what he isolates are, on one hand a set of formal constraints, that is logical ways in which we can connect together thought, and on the other hand aesthetic forms, that is space and time, the forms within which the content of thought comes to us. And Kant's essential breakthrough, if you like, in philosophy is to say these universal conditions,
which make any kind of cognition possible, can also be studied, can also be discussed philosophically. And yet, at the same time, they're not the subject of experience. They're not something that we can experience in themselves. We never experience the conditions, because every experience we have is conditioned by them. So they're something that, in a sense, is outside, and yet it conditions everything that's within our experience. And this is what Kant calls the transcendental. And what's interesting in Kant is that, in a sense, what he wants to do is to provide a grounding for the physical sciences to say, what's the ultimate reason why physics works? What's the ultimate reason why we're able to formulate these incredibly powerful laws
that then enable us to make all sorts of machines to affect the world, to manipulate the world. In essence, what is enlightenment? What is the power of reason and understanding that's enabled us to make these incredible leaps forward? But in doing so, he seems to instantiate this prophylactic barrier, this transcendental barrier between experience and the conditions of experience. So the conditions of experience have to be treated by a special science. i.e. philosophy. We can't talk about the conditions of experience in terms of physics because physics is something that happens inside our experience. So in a sense it's this interluctable break which, once you've accepted it,
you can't go back on, which disjoins the question about what we are and how our thinking works from any of the deliverances of that thought, from any of the specific realms of knowledge that we are able to handle. And this transcendental strain of thought then is radicalised further, particularly by Edmund Husserl in the late 19th, early 20th century, in what becomes known as phenomenology. And Husserl, I'm obviously being very schematic here, but Husserl essentially is saying, okay why does Kant start with scientific knowledge? Why does Kant begin to interrogate the transcendental structure of knowledge
by talking about scientific knowledge? Because scientific knowledge is only one local area of our thought. It might issue kind of astounding claims about the world. It might be very effective but nonetheless it's just one type of thought. if we're going to be transcendental if we're going to talk about the ultimate structures that condition human experience then we have to in a certain sense push back this barrier further than this and essentially this is done through an attention to what's called intentionality that is all of our thoughts are intentional all of our thoughts are oriented towards the goals that we set ourselves in our lives
and the overriding structure of the world. Now the world for Husserl is to be understood transcendentally. That is, the world for me is the interconnection of all of the intentional structures in my life. So for instance, where Kant might say, look at a cup of coffee and say, what is it that enables us to define the spatial characteristics of this cup? Husserl is saying, well that's just a very limited type of knowledge. What we should be doing is asking, what is this coffee cup to me? It's something that I'm drinking to wake me up so that I can write an essay, so that I can advance my academic career. So every object is connected to a whole network of intentionality
and into a whole world. Every object in a sense reflects the world of which it's a part. Now, I think the next stage to talk about, again being very schematic and kind of jumping from one thing to another, is Heidegger's thought, in which he, in a sense, carries on Husserl's work and attempts to radicalise phenomenology even further. And eventually, to get to the stage where, in Heidegger's Transcendental Ontology, he wants to say, the question is no longer, or rather, the question now becomes one of the ultimate type of being which asks the question to start with.
So what's really interesting is not the answer to the question. What we have to start with is what kind of being questions. And Heidegger's ultimate answer to this will be what he calls Dasein, being there. So the human, for Heidegger, can no longer be defined in any of the ways that philosophers defined it before. It's not a rational animal. It's not a talking animal. It's not a writing animal, etc., etc. The human is a structure of being. It's a structure of being there, which for Heidegger involves a kind of disorientation in a sense, a kind of being thrown into the world without quite knowing why you're there and having to question, therefore. But also it's a structure of temporalisation.
That is, the human, the Dasein being there is to do with temporalising, with creating time. So what we do is to create projections into the future, to recollect the past, and therefore to exist within a temporal structure. And that is the ultimate, if you like, transcendental condition of experience. And to go back to this question of the kind of contamination and the shutting off of the transcendental from the content of experience, For Heidegger, it's always a mistake to try to define the human in terms of any local structure of knowledge. So this temporalizing structure can't be understood through biology, through physics, through cognitive science if it had existed in Heidegger's day.
And in the present day, you find a lot of Heideggerians arguing vehemently against the project of cognitive science itself. i.e. the idea that one can somehow understand what it is to be human by examining the physical constitution of an organism. so as you can see I hope through this this kind of sequence in philosophy what's happening is that the question of what the human is becomes progressively more and more protected against any kind of inquiry that isn't purely philosophical that is to say the question of what we are becomes inviolable
to anything that we might do, to any kind of knowledge that we might develop. And indeed, in the late Heidegger's work, it becomes the subject of poetry and not of reasoning, even philosophical reasoning. So hopefully that gives you a little bit of background about the kind of articles of faith, of philosophy, if you like, that Brassier is really kind of kicking against. And he gives a very good example of Dupuis' work where Dupuis is taking this position and applying it to a very contemporary project of, if you like, transforming the human
through this new nexus of technological knowledge. so where does this fit with accelerationism? I guess the thing is to say that immediately there's a political dimension to this or perhaps not immediately but certainly by the time of Husserl's later work, Husserl's explicitly linking this transcendental mode of thought with the question of technology. Let's talk about this in terms of orientation.
What's the orientation of the human? How do we orient ourselves in the world? Well, orientation, the word orientation obviously comes from orient, so it's to do with the position of the sun. In order to orient yourself, You need something that's invariant. You can't have orientation without invariance. So you need a clear sense of your relation to something, something that doesn't change or something that's regular. The primary one, of course, is the sun. And right from the beginning of Western philosophy with Plato, you have the sun as a symbol of the supreme source of truth. And this runs through all of Western philosophy. So how do we orient ourselves today? what's the status of human orientation under the
reign of intensive, complex technologisation of society well, in a very simple way we orient ourselves with this so there's a set of satellites in geostationary orbit whose signals we can receive we triangulate that with an immense network of digital memories, transmitters and receivers. We obtain a numerical value for our location. And in everyday life, we orient ourselves using this device. So we orient ourselves from a point of view which is absolutely impossible. That is the Earth as seen from space. And yet we do this in an everyday kind of way.
and most often and as I said connected to this kind of sequence of transcendental philosophy of the transcendentalizing of the question of what we are and what we can do most often linked with that has been a sentiment of disorientation the sentiment of uprooting of being disoriented of losing our proper ground so if I can find it I'm going to read this quote from Heidegger. So this is Heidegger in 1966. This is about the first photograph that was taken from space of the moon, of the Earth, sorry, with the moon on the horizon, which is called, I think, the Blue Marble.
And Heidegger says, I don't know if you were shocked, but I was shocked when I saw the pictures of the Earth taken from the moon. We do not need atom bombs at all. The uprooting of man is already here. all our relationships have become merely technical ones. It's no longer upon an earth that man lives today. This was already the sentiment, I think, in Husserl's work. In 1934, Husserl issued this incredible phrase, which I like to say in German just because it sounds so good. He says, Das Archeröder bewegst nicht, which means the primal arc, Earth, does not move. So this is like the ultimate statement of Transcendentalism and the ultimate statement of this will to contain the technical,
to contain scientific knowledge, to contain the massively complex web of manipulation of nature, to contain it back within the human because what Husserl's talking about is what he calls the human life world. So he's saying we might be able to produce mathematical equations and physical measurements that prove that the Earth moves around the Sun. We might be able to send spaceships into orbit. We might be able to do X, Y, Z. But at the same time, The primal arc doesn't move. Our life world, the world within which all of this unfolds, doesn't move.
Nothing changes, really. It's really like the ultimate philosophical gambit to re-secure the human back to something in which it can feel oriented. And by the life world, Husserl understands this transcendental structure within which experience unfolds, this set of conditions which are inviolable to any kind of thing that we might make or that we might do. So this life world, this Lebenswelt, is retained as the horizon of meaning, as the horizon of life and death, earth and sky, versus the universe, the scientific universe that's being uncovered gradually.
So in a sense it becomes a question of sense or meaning against the technical extension of the dominion of knowledge and of the manipulation of nature. So in a sense what Kant unleashes with the attempt to ground scientific knowledge is in fact a counter-enlightenment. Eventually transcendentalism becomes a movement of counter-enlightenment, a movement against technicization. And of course this is historically politically conditioned by the growth of capitalism, the incredible complexification of the social and the technical
under the Industrial Revolution, and then latterly by the catastrophes of the 20th century, in particular the Second World War. So this space and time which are not human, which we orient ourselves by, essentially kind of become derided as a going astray, a going astray, a disorientation, versus the persistence of an original or authentic orientation. And with profound political consequences, because it means, as in this example, our everyday action is completely disconnected from what makes it possible, from its true roots. There's this process of abstraction through which we interact with these technical objects,
and yet we have no idea how to get from the principles by which they work to the ideas which produce them. We have no idea how they work. They simply integrate themselves artificially into our life world. I'm going a little bit astray now, but I'll go to the talk about the Neolithic Revolution, which was a slow, strange to call it a revolution, because it was a slow, a very slow reorientation over thousands of years. But what's interesting about it is that it's an opening up of many new paths that would define human history from then on. the control of nature, agriculture, building, pottery, eventually metallurgy.
And in terms of orientation, it's interesting to think about this in terms of new invariants. So whereas in pre-Neolithic life, undoubtedly the life of humans was orientated around the sun, around various simple invariants. what happens in the Neolithic is that it begins to become oriented around invariants which are not immediately available in the so-called human life world so for instance as soon as you make a pot as soon as you work out how a pot is made at what point it's fired at what point it becomes usable you're interacting with something that's invariant
something that's in nature but which you can't directly apprehend. So there's already quite a level of abstraction involved there. And this level of abstraction can only be socially maintained through memory, through forms of social memory, through inscription, inscription on the landscape and eventually symbolic inscriptions via memory traces and essentially the society into which we enter them is one of what the philosopher Bernard Stiegler calls tertiary inscription, that is the inscription of human history in a third party,
in a material which does not belong to the biological lineage of the human. and so from that point on arguably an artificial life world is what defines the human because the human becomes defined by its social character and its social character is maintained through an interaction with invariants that would otherwise not be available with a kind of multiple feedback loop of ramifications. And what's interesting about the Neolithic is, I think, I'm not an expert on this, but I think if you look back in the history of the literature, it was assumed for a long time
that somehow the Neolithic pattern of living made things easier. And increasingly it began to seem like that wasn't necessarily the case. like in fact what's interesting is that you move from a society of essentially a society of abundance to a society in which you're doing agriculture and it's in fact rather difficult you're increasing the population because of agriculture which makes things more difficult and so there's this kind of ratchet effect in which it doesn't seem like making life easier is necessarily what's at stake. It seems like there's a kind of, interestingly, a kind of compulsion to reorientate, for humans to sacrifice immediacy
and to become producers at greater and greater intensity, and to transform nature. And this is essentially Marx's image of the human, the human as a producer. I think Ray mentions it in here. The human is a producer who produces a second nature, a social nature, which frees us from our servitude to nature, but at the same time you can see it as also being a trap, that is, it's something that seems to be irreversible. We can go further back to talk about orientation. and there's a really interesting strain of work that's being done now
particularly by the philosopher and mathematician Giuseppe Longo who's kind of doing new work in integrating evolutionary biology cognitive science and the philosophy of science to try to understand how it is that the incredible kind of abstractions of mathematics can emerge from our life world and to try and understand the kind of thread that leads between the two and his work shows how this kind of unfolding of invariants might be understood to go right back to the biological realm to emerge from biological systems because what biological systems need to do is to stabilise their relation to the world so they need to identify invariants
which will enable them to successfully reproduce and live and so on stabilisation So the simplest example would be the tick. In the famous ethologist Von Uckskul, he describes in great detail the tick. The tick's only orientation is towards the smell of blood. It just hangs for months, for years, until it smells blood and then it drops. So there's this invariant which its entire life world is built around. A more interesting example is the sea squirt, which is a marine invertebrate. It's one of the first creatures to have a kind of simple cerebral structure.
And it's interesting because it allows us to ask the question what a brain is for. So what the sea squirt does is it starts off as a kind of tadpole thing. Then it grows its brain and it grows a tail. and basically it's looking for a place on the seabed where it can carry out the rest of its biological activities and where it can get food. So it swims around and it will find a place and kind of root itself on the sea floor. But it's actually what happens after that that's interesting which is that first the sea squirt digests its tail and then it digests its brain. Why? Because it no longer needs its brain because what the brain is for is to identify invariance in the environment to follow them, so it's for locomotion and orientation.
So that, in a sense, gives us a clue as to how, if you like, the human reorientations are in one sense continuous with evolutionary reorientations. And we could go into other... I think anyone who's interacted with a baby will understand this thing about invariance, like the way that small children are always overreaching, underreaching, exploring space and gradually coming to the invariance, to identify the invariance that enable them to carry out what they want to do effectively. And I guess the suggestion is just as the brain,
just as the development of the brain itself is this process of orientation, so the evolutionary development of the complex brain is also a process of orientation, reorientation. So there's even a kind of abstraction in animals. For instance, where a predator is tracking its prey, so the prey is over here and the predator needs to catch it. It needs to draw a line from here to here. Now that line doesn't exist anywhere in nature. It's a pure product of abstraction. And yet the brain has to produce that. and to do so it has to identify what is it in my experience that will change when I move and what will stay the same. So this form of abstraction of memory, anticipation, selective forgetting is already there
to select what's important for the imperatives that one is pursuing. So I think I've kind of gone completely off course what I was going to say. so yeah so in a sense that was just to give a kind of a broader background as possible to how one could formulate the position where what the question of what it is to be human is no longer if you like bracketed off from human activities and from what we can do and as ray says in the paper that enables you then to ask the question what do we want to make of ourselves enables you to ask a political question, an anthropological question, and a philosophical question about what humans can make of themselves.
And one of the common things that people writing about and around accelerationism, accelerationism, what they have in common, is the feeling that emancipatory politics, a politics which aims to free the potential of humans from the contemporary system of capitalism, if you like, has increasingly been pitted against the deliverances of enlightenment. That is, leftist politics in particular seems to have turned toward deriding and recusing the very project of understanding the world, controlling it, manipulating it and even manipulating ourselves.
the reason being that the technologies which appear to do that are historically attached to capitalism capitalism is evil therefore science technology is somehow tainted and there's been a kind of progressive distancing of political thinking from technology both at the end of the spectrum of highly intellectual projects of thinking contemporary capitalism and at the end of the spontaneous activism which in a sense has sought to take solace in fleeting forms of collective celebration
or in terms of creating temporary autonomous zones away from the world rather than engaging in this very serious and vexed question of what we can make of ourselves and what we would need to know and engage with to even start to ask that question. Because, as I've said, obviously we're a long way away from understanding the technologies which mediate our relationship to the world and whether the idea that each one of us could somehow absorb all of the knowledge necessary to really understand what this was doing is obviously ridiculous. We just don't have the capacity.
We live in a world where the experience, the kind of mediated experience, the medium of our experience is cognitively opaque to us. There's just no way in which we can grasp it in a way that would satisfy, for example, Husserl, to kind of integrate it into our life world in a satisfactory way that we would feel that we know what we're doing. We don't know what we're doing. So I guess then accelerationism is pushing against this defensive mode, which in Ray's piece, I would say Ray is kind of connecting this defensive mode of politics to this deep philosophical background to do with the question of the human and the transcendental.
A defensive mode of localism, of community, of putting the brakes on things, of emphasising the counterfinality of technology. That is to say, emphasising the fact that, oh, you produce technology to do something, but you don't know what it will do. So we better hold back, we better not do anything just in case. And again, this is a kind of a legacy of the intellectual response and trauma of the two great wars, I think. and what's ironic I guess about this is that in Ray's sense Marx is very much Promethean Marx doesn't see the development of
the transition from feudalism to capitalism as being a catastrophic moment in the development of humanity on the contrary he thinks that the tremendous thing about the complex system of machines, this very kind of complex, layered, ramified system of machines in which the human becomes a part of this vast global network, is in fact the kind of evolution of the human being. Because it makes human beings, individuals, into social beings, it irretrievably and irreversibly contaminates the human with the social and the technical. And Marxist problem is not with that. Marxist problem is with the mode of production of capitalism,
which takes a hold of that. So this is a key point in accelerationism, is that the argument that one can actually separate capitalism from its historical product, that is the incredible bodies of knowledge and technical means of manipulation of nature, which it's produced can be dissociated or are not indissociable from capitalism. Capitalism is obviously the historical origin, but there's no logical reason why all of these things in some sense belong to capital. Once a technology is produced,
in what sense does it belong to capitalism? so I'm just going to go back to Ray's work and one interesting thing about what Ray does in this piece is that in his previous work he built very much on a dualism which was introduced by an American philosopher Wilfred Sellers which is between what's called the manifest image and the scientific image and it's very much exactly what we've talked about the manifest image is the image which we have spontaneously of what we are what our capabilities are and of how we relate to the world it's um it's the image of myself from inside if
you like the scientific image on the other hand is this kind of uprooting alienating account of what human beings are which we don't recognize intuitively it seems wrong we don't recognize it It tells us things about ourselves which perhaps we'd rather not know. It seems to objectify us. It seems to do all of the things that this lineage of philosophy I was talking about wants to act against. So the question is, given that we have these two images, the manifest image and the scientific image, is this simply, as Husserl saw it, he just called it the crisis. It's a crisis. is it something that can never be healed as it were is it possible to create a stereoscopic image
where we understand our intuitive sense of ourselves and the scientific image of ourselves together well of course for transcendental philosophy for Husserl, for Heidegger no, you can never do that the scientific image is just like a local piece of knowledge which is situated within this wider life world of the human which is never going to change. Well, too bad because this localised bit of knowledge is having quite a profound effect on how we experience ourselves, how we experience our relationships with others and how we interact with the world. So there's two complications I'd like to mention about this question of the manifest image and the scientific image. I was going to say about Ray, so the interesting thing is in his earlier work,
Basically, he was saying the scientific image produces a nihilistic thought. It produces a thought in which we are unable to grasp ourselves as anything that makes sense. It evacuates all sense and meaning. And whereas the philosophy of the 20th century had decried that, had complained about that, had tried to put in place these defenses against that meaninglessness, what Ray says is no, this is an opportunity we should treat nihilism as an opportunity so we should accelerate this passage into meaninglessness because there's no reason to think that it will deliver anything that's worse than what humanity has already done
so what's interesting in here is that he's kind of nuancing this position it seems to me that what's at stake here is that we can't dismiss the manifest image. What we have to think about is some kind of cycle in which the manifest image can actually, our image of ourselves can actually be updated, can be modified, and in which our sense of what we are and what we can do can be altered and transformed by the very deliverances of that activity. So there's two complications. is that just first of all the manifest image is spontaneous to us but in fact of course it's not spontaneous our spontaneous intuitive grasp of the world doesn't come all at once it's the product
as we've discussed of this long process of orientations and of selections of what's important and it was Nietzsche who was the first philosopher who really brought this forward in philosophy saying what you spontaneously think your inherited intuitive ideas your truths are only truth because they're what has been useful to you that's why there are these incredibly strong persistent ideas because they're useful that doesn't necessarily mean they're true and conversely the truth might be something that is not useful to you and that is disturbing to you and which will potentially turn you into something else.
And the second point about this manifest image and the scientific image is that it has a real political valence because what's powerful about consumer capitalism is that it has no discrimination. Capitalism essentially uses whatever it can get its hands on, right? so it's not as if we're being subjected to capitalism instrumentalising us by using the scientific image to manipulate us yes it's doing that but at the same time it's delivering those manipulations and those kind of those transformations of the human made possible by technology it's delivering them to us
always with a human face so it basically is confirming the manifest image while using the scientific image. And this is one of the most thorny problems, I think, to deal with in contemporary capitalism. And even in the lineage of accelerationist thought, it's a kind of stumbling block. I don't think accelerationists writing in the 90s saying capitalism is uprooting us and alienating us and turning us into something else, and it's really exciting, and we shouldn't protest against it. we should accelerate this process and not realise that capitalism was not going to accelerate us into some world where everything was really in Blade Runner and it was already exciting.
In fact, it's just going to give us Facebook and MySpace. It's just going to beam our face back to us through the mediation of incredibly complex technologies that we don't understand at all. So to finish then, any politics that fails to deal with these kind of global complexities is inevitably a failure. And along with the manifest image, along with our intuitive grasp of ourselves and everything that reassures us about that goes of folk politics, a politics that's based on our traditional understanding of ourselves as agents in the world,
of what we can, the effects we can have, traditional notions of collectivity and what that means. And essentially I think even in its mildest form, even if it's in its most friendly form, accelerationism would at least have to say you have to deal with these systems which you can't cognitively encompass within the human life world. And therefore that politics is going to look very different to pitching your tent in a park. So I want to finish with a couple of videos.
they're all really quite cheesy. But what I've tried to reflect in them, I think, is something about the kind of technologies that I think are interesting to look at. They're not necessarily the technologies with the deepest social consequences. But I think they're kind of, in a way, they're kind of figures or lost connection. So that's the first one, lost connection. Let's play this one. Soylent began as an idea to create the ultimate food. The goal wasn't to replace food, but to provide a better alternative to what we usually eat. It takes a little bit of perspective to see that food really is made out of chemicals.
It is reducible, and we can build it back up, and we can change it, and we can make it better. Soylent is an alternative to traditional food that gives people a convenient, affordable, and healthy way to fuel their bodies. It's a sustainable food source designed to keep the human body in a balanced state of ideal nutrition. I have a background as an engineer. I studied electronics and computation. But what I really learned was how it's a very problem. Everything is made of quacks. Everything can be broken down. Unlike most other foods which prioritize taste and texture, Sola was engineered to maximize nutrition, to nourish the body in the most efficient way possible. To better understand the intricate requirements of the human body, the team consulted with nutritional experts and food scientists.
Your body is constantly replenishing its cells and it needs parts to do that. Macro-nutrients, electrolytes, vitamins, minerals, we know what we're made of. And that's what Soylent is, the most simplistic thing that we can live on and furthermore be quite healthy on. Using Soylent as a resource means that you can take the time you would normally spend preparing, eating, and cleaning up your meals and put that time into other areas of your life. It's shipped directly to you and comes in a powdered form that doesn't expire for two years. One bite equals one day of food. Just mix the Soylent with water and you've got a complete day's worth of nutrition ready in less than three minutes. At less than $3 per meal, a bag makes an entire day's worth of food for $9. Compared to other meals, Soilent's nutritional value per dollar is unmatched.
Due to the volume in the nutrient content, so it ends up being quite filled, your body certainly learns that this is a very nourishing substance. It's very, very satisfying. Hundreds of people have been living on Soilent for months, and an even larger DIY community has been helping and customizing the open source formula. If you're going to improve food, you're going to have to be open to a change in the system. A food production system that scales very well, that has very minimal impact on the environment. Food that takes on a little spoil is easier to transport, and that's what Soilent is. By using Soilent as a resource, you can guarantee your body gets the nutrition it needs. As a low-cost way to be healthy and save yourself some time, Soilent gives you the freedom to live life the way you want to live. Did tell you it was cheesy didn't it?
So it's a story about vape liquid and the fact that I'm guessing everyone's seen one of these before, but these electronic cigarettes, there's a kind of culture that's been building up around them where people are making their own flavours. essentially like it's a very simple formula because it's just glycol and I think a bit of water and then you can add flavours into it. Of course what they don't say on this report is that people are also putting other substances into it but so basically like it's a large part of this is that it's unregulated of course which has caused a lot of problems in Germany actually I was in Berlin recently and apparently they're not allowed to sell it there but most places it's unregulated and I think it came from China originally
and there's obviously something quite significant in that it's really like the first alternative to tobacco that's actually taken off as a kind of culture which is interesting. I'll say a bit more about that. It would be good if we could get this one to work. Maybe we can't. So this third one, but you can maybe look at it upstairs afterwards. So it's a site for a movie, but what's interesting is not the movie, but the fact they're using this technology called Spritz. Spritz is like a really tiny little app that you can put on any web page,
and which is basically for speed reading. So what happens is, apparently as your eye moves from word to word, There's always this particular letter in every word that it will centre on in order to comprehend the word. So what this technology does is it just delivers one word at a time, positioned in the right place, so that basically your eye will never have to move. So essentially it's cutting off about 60% of the time that you spend reading, which is spent going from jerking your eyes, like jerking from one word to the next. and it's just delivering the words in a stream which I think the slowest it goes is 350 words a minute and it goes up to I think a thousand now and it's really, I mean, you could go and have a look at their website it's really remarkable just how fast you can read
so yeah, this is like a trailer that's they use it Maybe. It's like in the Netherlands, doesn't it? But let me just say what I was going to say about these anyway. And if people are interested, they can look them up. So the interesting thing I think about all of these three technologies, regardless of whether you think they're kind of significant in the wider scheme of things.
I mean, the first thing is obviously that it's... I don't think one can deny any longer that science fiction is indistinguishable from reality. You know, it's really like a thin line between science fiction and what's really being done. And one of the reasons for that is that these kind of technologies are not technologies which are created to solve one particular problem. What's interesting about them is they're what are called in, I guess in business language, are called platforms. That is, they are vehicles for other things. So once you have Soylent, you can make all different kinds of Soylent and you can use it for different purposes.
You can hack it, you can formulate it differently depending on what physical activities you're going to do, etc. With Vape Liquid, it's quite self-evident that it's a platform for the delivery of any type of substance which you might choose to ingest quickly through your lungs. Just leave it running. And with Spritz. So what's really interesting about Spritz is it actually kind of, again, it's like a platform. You don't really know what you could do with it. One thing that's obvious is that if you have a very small device like a watch, you can read from it. Yeah, I mean, I think it's quite surprising that the first time you see it,
you can really comprehend it. So the one thing about them is their platforms. And this has an interesting effect on this argument from counterfinality. That is the argument that when you do technology, you don't know what you're going to do. You don't know what the effects are going to be. You think that you have means and an end. But, well, in fact, these kind of technologies aren't really kind of means-to-end technologies. What they do is they create something before they know exactly what it's going to be useful for. And that, in a sense, is contained in the notion of the platform, is that you don't know what you could do with it, and you also don't know what other technologies you could link it up to. Like, who knows what kind of weird connections could be made
between reading extremely fast and drinking Soylent. You know, all of these things are there to be connected up together, and probably through Facebook, maybe in a couple of years, Facebook won't exist. So that's one thing, platforms. The other thing is there's no containment of kind of spheres of knowledge or spheres of application. The biological, the technological, the pharmacological, the social are all intermingling. There's no kind of sense that these technologies belong in one area and not another. Another thing is the way in which they bypass our own relation to ourselves, so particularly in the case of spritz.
I mean, you can get it up to a rate at which you have a strange experience that you're understanding and reading the words, but without consciously having seen the words go by. So it kind of bypasses this layer of yourself, which is a really strange and interesting experience. and it interferes with this technologically mediated way in our kind of sense of ourselves and our activities. And then I guess the most fundamental thing, like in terms of what we've been talking about, is just that this kind of... When you manipulate materials, when you manipulate the products of industry and re-manipulate them, break them apart,
splinter them, turn them into something else. You're also splintering meaning, like the meaning of these things is really affected. The meaning of reading is affected by it no longer being arrayed in one space, but by being streamed. The reading becomes something more like streaming video or streaming audio than what we know is reading. With vaping, it's really interesting because you've got a very kind of long-standing, traditional kind of congealed set of meanings around smoking, which by taking smoking apart and rebuilding it with different technologies is really like splintered and broken apart. So, and that's obviously like at the root of a lot of the fears about it because, you know, if you've got bubblegum-flavoured vape liquid,
then, you know, where does that leave... where is that is it does it become a suite who's allowed to have it why is it not regulated um can i smoke without killing myself now so a lot all these kind of um this thing which seemed to be one complex of meaning smoking we knew what it means it's kind of chopped up into all these different bits and therefore you know it kind of um well i guess the ultimate thing to say is yes, these things do affect our life world and they are going to affect our life world and we don't yet know what we can make of ourselves and accelerationism is the proposition that we should see that as an opportunity rather than a threat. Thank you.
I thought the idea of the manifest image in the scientific image was really useful. I thought capitalism kind of confirms the manifest image through its use of the scientific image. I wonder whether, just thinking about things like vaping, so you've got this folk politics of smoking which relies on the old, this kind of object of smoking, and the vape blows that part, but then it does kind of, but then the folk politics does have a meaningful interaction with the scientific, because say in Korea it's banned, or in Germany it's regulated
So, I guess, yeah, obviously accelerationism isn't one kind of moving force, but how do you see, kind of, do you see if there's a way out of folk politics? Or is that the aim, to think in other politics that can't be thought? well I think the I mean the accelerationism the idea of accelerationism just kind of came about through I guess a small group of people who are talking about that very question and I don't think there's an answer to that question I think there's a will to think seriously about what is at stake in that question and to be
I guess to be realistic about what politics does even if it means being extremely disappointed and to start from there rather than kind of taking comfort in illusions but at the same time I think what's important about accelerationism is that it's kind of defiantly I'm not sure if I'd say optimistic but defiantly positive in the sense that it refuses to despair in the face of what seemed like insuperable odds against the human, because it doesn't believe that the human is any fixed thing that can be usurped, if you like.
I guess it just seems interesting to me that capitalism manages to use work politics and manifest image to its advantage, whereas maybe emancipation politics is hobbled by our own ideals and we really are but I think going back to Ray's work it's kind of interesting in terms of his new found diplomacy to see how if you go back there was obviously a group of people to whom the idea of accelerating nihilism and making everything meaningless was quite appealing But as a political program, it's unlikely to gain many adherents. So yeah, I think in terms of concrete political movement,
any accelerationism would have to be to do with kind of pathfinding from folk politics into a new kind of politics. And that would mean, I guess, kind of gently breaking down these articles of faith. But at the same time, there's also, I think, an accelerationist will. You know, it's not as if everyone really wants to go back to feudal times. I mean, it's ridiculous. As if we all really want to go back to living in huts and hunting every day. There's a kind of an accelerationist will. People are excited by technology, people are excited by strange, disorienting experiences.
And I think a part of accelerationism would be to harness that libidinization to something other than making people buy new shit all the time. Can I ask a question? Yeah. That would be very impressive. I was wondering what the implications might be for a artistic production making art to come to this idea. It's not a question that I think I can answer. I can try and quickly think of an opinion. One thing is, I think, I'm going to say something negative. One thing is that I think contemporary art has a deep complicity with reactionary politics, particularly in its continuing insistence that indeterminacy is political.
That is to say, the idea that producing a situation of indeterminacy where things seem to be open in a local space somehow has a political valence in anything other than an imaginary register. and I think contemporary art is interesting from the point of view of its economics and its kind of prominent position in culture but it would have to do something with that which would it would have to kind of
disencumber itself with a whole set of illusions about its political leverage. I think there's two things sit very uncomfortably together. So, given that a large amount of money and power are bound up with contemporary art, then it seems to me obvious that it can have some political effect. But what it's interested in doing is producing political feelings. And that's the same problem as with folk politics. It's interested in producing a sentiment of freedom, a sentiment of outsideness, which in fact it can't deliver. Can I ask what might happen when the proponents of accelerationism became invested with this
similar levels of power and power as well? Might they fall from the narrow path that yeah I think this is part of the core problematic I mean I should say like the notion of accelerationism was kind of kicked off most of all by this accelerationist manifesto which is in the book by two guys Alex and Nick which was kind of an attempt to even kind of suitably political style to write a manifesto for what an accelerationist politics might be and yeah so the answer to your question yeah so one of the things it has to deal with is yes this question of how so you know aren't you
wouldn't this simply be to like set up a new technocracy on one side it's got to deal with the fact that horizontalism doesn't work right we know that Occupy is extremely successful in terms of organising horizontal structures of communication and we know that that doesn't work. Horizontal is actually an outmoded concept of how technology and society works. We're not talking about this horizontal network. That's a chimera. We're talking about, like I was saying, platforms, ramified structures and very complex mechanisms which any politics would have to come to terms with. and I think
maybe in and I think in doing so the suggestion is that alliances would have to be made across many different kind of spheres of human activity which would which I think you know I think probably the the claim would be that this would produce a mode of power that was neither top-down nor horizontalist in structure and i think that's your right to bring it up and it's probably like one of the most speculative parts because until you do it you don't know but the the proposition of the accelerationist manifesto is that
it needs organisation it needs it needs investment, it needs think tanks it needs alliances across technology, design politics so it's very much post the idea that some kind of horizontal movement from that something would emerge which could overpower this massively ramified complex structure but what that would look like I don't think anyone can say can determine right now it's an interesting point if politics needs expression
and if you can't offer a vision then how can you offer that as an alternative if you don't have a clear vision I suppose you were saying you're not going to create a vision yourself No, I think that's a really important point. And it's actually one where, like, towards the... This book was put together quite quickly. And, like, every week I was finding more pieces to put in. And quite near to the end, Patricia Reid, who's an artist and a writer from Berlin, Canadian, who lives in Berlin, she wrote this piece which is right at the end of the book which I think she makes seven points about
the kind of fault lines she sees in accelerationism and that's precisely one of them is that without images, without visions to mobilise desire, you don't get anywhere with politics and maybe that's where artists fit into it that we can actually create these images and it's basically to do with science fiction It's about creating science fictions that... It's about creating fictions whose force becomes a part of bringing them about in reality. Which is never going to be straightforward, because you're never going to envision something, and then it's going to be exactly how you envisioned it. But the force of images and the force of visioning is very much something that I think politics can't do without.
And as we know, that's all that politics is about. Politics today, such as it is, sustains itself entirely on the circulation of images. Can I ask a question about the, um, the sewage? Um, because, I feel like that can't be real advert because of the thunderstorms. Yeah, it's brilliant isn't it? I think that's the triumph of marketing. It actually does say on the webpage what's Soylent made of and it says underneath not people. But it's based on the same idea, Soylent Green which is just hoping the future
that nobody would want and of course it makes sense. So in the first way, which is in the 1970s, I don't know when that film was made, in the 70s maybe. There were people living on this stuff called soil, which may have ground up people, basically. And he literally says in the advert, if that's what it is, you know, this is made of the things that people are made of. And I thought, whoa, how are you going to persuade us? You know, we've seen the soil growing up. Well, it's not about seeing that particular film, That whole dystopian horror that that film promulgates and explores sports, it's in there. That's exactly the shift of perspective that I'm talking about, I think. And Soylent, they launched it as a Kickstarter project looking for, I don't know, like $30,000 or something.
And they got $2 million. This is not funded by venture capital. This is funded by people who are really into it and want it to happen. And it's real. The investors wanted them to change the name and they refused because the founders liked the name because of this. Because it is a kind of like, it's only a horrifying dystopia if we all agree to a kind of folk politics. Well, I think like eating round up people is pretty bad even if you're not into folk people. Surely. Well, yeah, I mean I probably would do it but then I'm stuck in the past. But surely that's kind of like the thought line. It's the logical next step. I think also the destruction of the planet isn't a prerequisite for its generation.
It's not necessarily connected at all. I think the sonic thing is this is the film that it's like ethically, morally, object, but also this whole thing is like environmental policy. It's interesting that we're horrified by that part of Soylent Green, and yet the euthanasia part is still a problem for us as well, which is arguably worse. I mean, it's arguably worse that it's a problem for us. It's kind of ridiculous that it's a problem. meanly assisted
they all stands for assisted that science fiction close to reality Paul's point again which is Paul was saying that acceleration isn't necessarily connected with concerns about the destruction of the planet is it in some sense I mean is there Is it one of the voters, one cryover of the movement, a kind of sense that actually there is a time to sit around and do black politics? Not exactly that, but taking it from the other end, if you're into anarcho-primitivism and you think capitalism has simply completely consumed the human being
and there's no way out of it, all we can do is recruit into another world, okay? Build another world in which we grow our own food and we know where our food comes from. We live a simple life. Now, today, you could only do that if you culled most of the population of the planet. So in that sense, it's like we need some, to be realistic, we need some kind of, some form of accelerationism, right? Secondly, why stay on this planet? This is a part of the kind of weird myopia that's developed as a result of this kind of suspicion of technology
and of the manipulation of nature, etc. You know, like 200 years ago, people were excited about colonising other worlds. They were excited about massive global projects that would bring the whole human race together and change the face of humanity, why are we so timid? Why are we thinking only in these terms? The answer to that is always, because if we do something, it might turn out bad. But what are we doing now? So, yeah, I mean, I think it's a question that it definitely has to face. But I don't think accelerationism Transliferationism is in any worse position politically than any other political position in terms of that.
Because basically we know that the processes that are going to really seriously transform this planet are underway. And there's no way of stopping them now. So we know we're going to have to adapt. And we know that's going to have radical political and human consequences. so we should be thinking in terms of the politics that thinks on that scale What about the other option of leaving our bodies in the sense of some reading about artificial intelligence leads to a left position where we abandon biological connectivity and that seems to pay problems to the idea
of manifest beings because then you'll use yourself if you're no longer bodily or biologetic. But is that too far distant, too far sci-fi to kind of bring you into the output? Well, I think, yeah, AI is kind of like something that I think everybody who's into accelerationism is interested in. And like, for instance, Nick Land pretty much would say not only is the inevitable destiny of human intelligence to be absorbed by some greater artificial intelligence. But in fact, that artificial intelligence is already controlling us from the future. So that would be one position.
And I don't know if you've heard of... What's the basilisk thing? What? Basilisk. Rocco's Basilisk, I think it's called. It's like this idea that basically you could be punished by the AI from the future for not suitably conforming to its plans. So there's that kind of thing. There's all sorts of different positions, I guess. One would be that we need to completely transform the idea of artificial intelligence away from this traditional model of a reproduction of a human. and we need to get used to the fact that artificial intelligence is already happening
and think of it in terms of a kind of collective social machine that we are participating in and ask ourselves, what kind of agency do we have in the construction of this other being? Because we don't have the kind of political agency that 19th century politics would understand? Do we have any agency at all? Maybe all politics, as Nick Land would no doubt say, all politics is futile, and all you can do is enjoy the accelerationism until the singularity. But on the other hand, maybe we're still a salient part of this process
of constructing a collective intelligent entity that will go somewhere else and take us with it. Although your example of the C-square is that it does sort of this notion of kind of moving and being in physical space does seem to be pretty essential to keeping our brain. Right, yeah. It's completely like the idea of a kind of back-moving that we just digest our intelligence. yeah totally yeah but I mean if you if you had access to some kind of system with another substrate which could support intelligence why would you upload a human onto it really I mean it would be kind of sad wouldn't it
it would be like using an Xbox to play Pac-Man or something no I agree I think there's a I'm not an expert in that area there's massive questions around embodiment intelligence and where the two meet and of course just on the question of what intelligence is and I think I was going to actually end this thing with some, I think we've probably gone, we've probably covered most of them but this is one of the sticking points for accelerationism one of them was the limits of plasticity which is like okay we understand humans are, human is something that can reorient and transform itself, but there are hard biological, cognitive limits to that.
Where are the limits of this plasticity? And even if we think not in terms of individual humans, but in terms of the social entity, surely there are limits to what we can do, and you can be more or less pessimistic about that. some would say humans are pretty dire examples of what intelligence can do and there's such a lot locked down biologically that we can't do anything about but thinking that we're going to somehow spring this intelligence out of its box is just over optimistic the second one was like this question of decoupling it from capitalism is it really the case that the engine of transformation and of complexification
can somehow be decoupled from capitalism as a system of incentives and compulsion. And the third one was the thing about libidinisation. It's like, how do you make an accelerationist politics work on the level that you could actually get people to participate in it? And then the last one was this question of intelligence. What is intelligence? and yeah, do we have any of it? So yeah, I think all of the questions that have been asked are exactly the questions that are being asked and should be asked within the kind of discourse of accelerationism such as it is
and who knows whether it will just kind of fizzle out and disappear or whether it will actually give rise to something Can I ask a quick question? you started out by saying that you have this tendency to start isms that have some kind of dismal legacy. And I was struck by, you titled the book Hashtag Accelerate, which seems to me to have this kind of inbuilt obsolescence that it's all about now on Twitter or Instagram hashtags. And so I guess my question, bearing those things in mind, is what do you see the immediate future for accelerationism as a discourse, I suppose, to be after this book? The use of the hashtag is really kind of self-conscious in that the whole conversation genuinely did come out
of using a hashtag and different people kind of getting onto it and with people from completely different areas and different disciplines putting Accelerate and that's actually how it kind of came into existence. So yeah, it's kind of also like a joke at the expense of everyone who's as soon as you put out a book is automatically going to say oh it's just a trend just say yeah yeah it is okay i'll grant you that from the front cover as to what it might produce there's various ways in which it could produce a very sterile body of thought as previous isms have succeeded in doing which is to say it could remain within the realm of discussing
the possibilities of what might happen rather than making any kind of experiments or any kind of headway into the kind of program that the manifesto describes, which, as I said, it talks about the need to take the discourse of emancipatory politics out of the academy and out of the endless talking shop and to understand what it would mean to build an effective political platform for the left or whatever you want to call it. And I think, and yeah, that just depends on people with the ideas connecting to people with ideas in other areas of life who are kind of sympathetic to it.
So like, I mean, design and technology being the obvious ones. on the other hand I'm sure like there's a kind of aesthetic of accelerationism which or probably many which will be taken up and will be experimented with and that's interesting to see you know like for the book an American artist Diane Bauer did these images which I thought were really nice because they're like pen and ink drawings which I thought was kind of cool to counteract the kind of futurism of the whole thing and she's very interested in kind of propaganda and
the way in which images are used and I think there's a group of artists there are many artists who are interested in how the image is used and how aesthetics compel politics and political commitment and whose only recourse right now let's face it, is to be critical which means to ironically stage that within the confined space of an art gallery and who would I'm sure be really happy to participate in some kind of experimental process of like Like, okay, let's try and get this thing going and see what happens
and what do we want it to look like? And that kind of envisioning that we were talking about. So I think, you know, in all these different areas, there's interest. I think, you know, I'm convinced that it asks the right questions. I've never been interested in publishing work that has a doctrine and that's like, this is the position. But what I'm interested in is like bringing together people who have very different opinions, but who I think are talking about the right problems. And that's really what Acceleration is, is that vastly diverging perspectives on what I think are really important problems. I think that's a good place to end.