ACCELERATIONISM

"yes i think i think the the minimal and most abstract abstract definition is that it's positive oriented cybernetics um so i and i think even uh in its kind of in its incarnation that i have been sort of tracking and involved with to some extent um that just simply is the way it uh it was generated i think it's like basically turning norbert wiener upside down"

"The modern Human Security System might even have appeared with Wiener's subliminal insight that everything cyberpositive is an enemy of mankind. Evolving out of work on weaponry guidance systems, his was an attempt to enslave cybernetics to a general defence technology against alien invasion. Cybernetics was itself to be kept under control, under a control that was not itself cybernetic. It is as if his thinking were guided by a blind tropism of evasion, away from another, deeper, runaway process: from a technics losing control and a communication with the outside of man."

"This is why in Deleuzean critique syntheses are considered to be not merely immanent in their operation, but also immanently constituted, or auto-productive. The philosophy of production becomes atheistic, orphan, and inhuman. In the technocosmos nothing is given, everything is produced."

"Positive feedback is the elementary diagram for self-regenerating circuitry, cumulative interaction, auto-catalysis, self-reinforcing processes, escalation, schismogenesis, self-organization, compressive series, deuterolearning, chain-reaction, vicious circles, and cybergenics. Such processes resist historical intelligibility, since they obsolesce every possible analogue for anticipated change."

"Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources. Digitocommodification is the index of a cyberpositively escalating technovirus, of the planetary technocapital singularity: a self-organizing insidious traumatism, virtually guiding the entire biological desiring-complex towards post-carbon replicator usurpation."

"Ccru consists of Datable Swarm-Convergences in process. It has no genealogy, geographical centre, biographical attribution, or institutional dependency."

"At the time of writing, Left-accelerationism appears to have deconstructed itself back into traditional socialist politics, and the accelerationist torch has passed to a new generation of brilliant young thinkers advancing an ‘Unconditional Accelerationism’ (neither R/Acc., or L/Acc., but U/Acc.)."

"one of the key dimensions of what I call capitalist realism. Why is capitalism the only sort of, held to be the only viable political system? Well, because it's the only one which engages with the plasticity of people's desires, so it is claimed. Desire is a kind of serpent that will destroy any other system. Capitalism, rather than trying to repress desire, then mobilizes it, metabolizes it, makes it fundamentally part of its system in a way that allegedly other systems can't."

"In any case, it is clear that, for the moment at least, capital cannot get along without us. It remains the case, however, that we can get along without it."

"But working in the public sector in Blairite Britain made me see that neoliberal capitalism didn’t fit with the accelerationist model; on the contrary, pseudo-marketisation was producing the pervasive, decentralised bureaucracy | describe in Capitalist Realism. My experiences as a teacher and as trade union activist combined with a belated encounter with Zizek — who was using some of the same conceptual materials as Ccru (the Freudian death drive; pulp culture, technology), but giving them a leftist spin — pushed me towards a different political position. I guess what I’m interested in now is in synthesising some of the interests and methods of the Ccru with a newleftism."

"Land 's 'right accelerationism' appears here as an inverted counterpart to the communitarian retreat in the face of real subsumption: like the latter, it accepts that the historical genesis of technology in capitalism precludes the latter from any role in a postcapitalist future."

"The claim of this book is that the last 40 years have been about the exorcising of, and here he quotes Marcuse, the spectre of a world which could be free. Adopting the perspective of such a world allows us to reverse the emphasis of much recent left-wing struggle. Instead of seeking to overcome capital, we should focus on what capital must always obstruct, the collective capacity to produce, to care and to enjoy."

"The reality is that this ultimate form is precisely what must be disputed. Both left and right accelerationisms claim to have the ultimate perspective on the process, but the truth of the matter is that we have no perspective at all. We remain inside it whilst the process leaks out onto a new plane to which we do not have access. As such, capitalism for us is slipping away from our grasp, and so a new blogosphere hoped to think accelerationism without institutionalising its resulting imperatives. Somewhat unfortunately, and ironically, unconditional accelerationism, or UAC, has precisely become a new institution to pledge allegiance to."