A speculative genealogy of accelerationist perspectives
Increasingly I think it makes sense to distinguish between different accelerationist positions. I rarely use the term to describe my own politics any more, both because I don’t want to risk association with far-right positions and because the potential vehicle for a left-accelerationist politics has been smashed into pieces. But my instincts remain left-accelerationist, in the sense of being inclined to ask how emerging technologies could be steered towards solidaristic and socially beneficial goals rather than being driven by the market. It means insisting we consider the technology analytically in ways which distinguish between emergent capacities and how those capacities are being organised at present by commercial imperatives. It means insisting we dive into the problems created by emerging technologies, going through them rather than seeking to go around them, rather than imagining we could hold them back by force of our critique.
In the mid 2010s this felt like quite an optimistic way to see the world but now it feels like a weirdly gloomy way to see the world, because the sense of collective agency underwriting such a future-orientation now seems largely, if not entirely, absent. It’s interesting therefore to see someone like Reid Hoffman, rare liberal member of the billionaire paypal mafia, offer a perspective which has some commonalities with this but could rather be described as a liberal humanist accelerationism. From pg 1-3 of the book Superagency, he’s written with Greg Beato:
We form groups of all kinds, at all levels, to amplify our efforts, often deploying our collective power against other teams, other companies, other countries. Even within our own groups of like-minded allies, competition emerges, because of variations in values and goals. And each group and subgroup is generally adept at rationalizing self-interest in the name of the greater good. Coordinating at a group level to ban, constrain, or even just contain a new technology is hard. Doing so at a state or national level is even harder. Coordinating globally is like herding cats—if cats were armed, tribal, and had different languages, different gods, and dreams for the future that went beyond their next meal. Meanwhile, the more powerful the technology, the harder the coordination problem, and that means you’ll never get the future you want simply by prohibiting the future you don’t want. Refusing to actively shape the future never works, and that’s especially true now that the other side of the world is only just a few clicks away. Other actors have other futures in mind. What should we do? Fundamentally, the surest way to prevent a bad future is to steer toward a better one that, by its existence, makes significantly worse outcomes harder to achieve.
The difference here is that he’s envisioning society as made up with more or less self-realised individuals, in a world in which power and vested interests is (primarily, at least) a matter of how those individuals interact rather than an enduring structural context to their interaction. But with this huge caveat, a lot of the assumptions and instincts here are similar to my own. This could in turn be contrasted to Tony Blair’s post-liberal accelerationism concerned with the role of the state under these conditions:
There’s a similar line of thought in this review by Nathan Pinkoski of Blair’s book on leadership. He describes Blair’s program as a “kind of post-liberal progressive rightism that promises to co-opt the progressive left while crushing the populist right”. Underlying this project is “a commitment to unlimited, unrestrained technological progress, and a belief that this will bring about a better world”.
And we might in turn distinguish this from the libertarian accelerationism of Marc Andreessen who seems to see little to no legitimate role ofr the state.
There’s a risk in distinguishing between these positions that we take them as doctrines, whereas I think they can better be understand as articulations of underlying instincts and orientations. How technology feels to people and how they feel about technology. Their inclination when presented with sociotechnical change etc.
