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#accelerationism

1 post1 participant0 posts today

"As I say in the book, Andreessen’s manifesto runs almost entirely on vibes, not logic. I think someone may have told him about the futurist manifesto at some point, and he just sort of liked the general vibe, which is why he paraphrases a part of it. Maybe he learned something about Marinetti and forgot it. Maybe he didn’t care.

I really believe that when you get as rich as some of these guys are, you can just do things that seem like thinking and no one is really going to correct you or tell you things you don’t want to hear. For many of these billionaires, the vibes of fascism, authoritarianism, and colonialism are attractive because they’re fundamentally about creating a fantasy of control."

technologyreview.com/2025/06/1

#AI #AGI #SuperIntelligence #Billionaires #SiliconValley #EffectiveAltruism #Rationalism #Long­Termism #Extropianism #Accelerationism #Futurism #Singularitarianism #Transhumanism

MIT Technology Review · Tech billionaires are making a risky bet with humanity’s futureBy Bryan Gardiner

“A new sub-current of accelerationism is forming within right-wing terrorist online communities. The first graffiti pointing to the network has also been spotted in Germany. It falls under the category of nihilistic accelerationism. A classification 🧵

The working term “Nihilistic Violence Extremism” (NVE) encompasses new networks that overlap but are primarily characterized by the use of extreme violence.

The networks' content focuses on sextortion, cybercrime, and offline crime. Recently discussed networks such as "764" and "COM" focus more on sextortion. They commit (sexual) violence, particularly against minors. Members have also recently become active in Germany:

Its goal is solely violence and the rejection of life, and the selection of victims is heavily influenced by right-wing extremist worldviews.

Two terrorist currents in particular can agree on the declared goal of democratic collapse, and they are increasingly converging there: right-wing terrorism and Islamist terrorism. Common denominators include, among other things, rejection of life, anti-Semitism, and anti-feminism.” ~ CeMAS

#accelerationism #violence #germany #terrorism #terrorgram
kontextwochenzeitung.de/gesell

more about CeMAS – Center für Monitoring, Analyse und Strategie gGmbH: cemas.io/impressum/

KONTEXT:WochenzeitungSchmierereien in Bad Herrenalb: Die Welt zerstören als ZielIn Bad Herrenalb sind Graffiti aufgetaucht, die auf satanistische oder rechtsextreme Netzwerke verweisen wie "no lives matter" und "Milikolosskrieg".

r/singularity is an awesome social media forum :)

"The moderators of a pro-artificial intelligence Reddit community announced that they have been quietly banning “a bunch of schizoposters” who believe “they've made some sort of incredible discovery or created a god or become a god,” highlighting a new type of chatbot-fueled delusion that started getting attention in early May.

“LLMs [Large language models] today are ego-reinforcing glazing-machines that reinforce unstable and narcissistic personalities,” one of the moderators of r/accelerate, wrote in an announcement. “There is a lot more crazy people than people realise. And AI is rizzing them up in a very unhealthy way at the moment.”

The moderator said that it has banned “over 100” people for this reason already, and that they’ve seen an “uptick” in this type of user this month.

The moderator explains that r/accelerate “was formed to basically be r/singularity without the decels.” r/singularity, which is named after the theoretical point in time when AI surpasses human intelligence and rapidly accelerates its own development, is another Reddit community dedicated to artificial intelligence, but that is sometimes critical or fearful of what the singularity will mean for humanity. “Decels” is short for the pejorative “decelerationists,” who pro-AI people think are needlessly slowing down or sabotaging AI’s development and the inevitable march towards AI utopia. r/accelerate’s Reddit page claims that it’s a “pro-singularity, pro-AI alternative to r/singularity, r/technology, r/futurology and r/artificial, which have become increasingly populated with technology decelerationists, luddites, and Artificial Intelligence opponents.”"

404media.co/pro-ai-subreddit-b

404 Media · Pro-AI Subreddit Bans 'Uptick' of Users Who Suffer from AI Delusions“AI is rizzing them up in a very unhealthy way at the moment.”

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.

Mark Carrigan · Was Tony Blair the first effective accelerationist?
More from Mark Carrigan

"I think that my assumption was a triumphalism and a sense of victory after the fall of the Soviet Union. But the fact that the week of the Berlin Wall falling, they were already talking about new enemies —enemies that had gone underground in certain ways or transformed in ways that were elusive — was the beginning of the rabbit hole. Because once you accept the idea that Marxism and socialism have survived and yet have changed their face, then anything can be Marxism and socialism.

I think this is how we can understand the fixation of the right wing on things like what they call “cultural Marxism” or “gender ideology” as essentially the new enemy of humanity. Because the adversary continuously changes shape, it makes them open to endless reinterpretation. There is a paranoid quality to the term. And the paranoia doesn’t really have any bounds, as I show in the book.

So I think the narrative arc comes from a feeling on the part of the libertarians, and often the racist libertarians, that they can contain their enemy in new ways by pinning it down on hierarchies of intelligence or deploying the latest findings from genetics. But by the end of the book, with a chapter on “gold bugs” and the far-right obsession with gold, there’s almost a sense of desperation or surrender to the inevitable, a failure to contain their enemies and the idea of an impending collapse and inevitable apocalypse.
(...)
What I recognize is a sort of desperation and a kind of ungoverned willingness to reach for radical remedies in a time of great peril. And as I described in the last chapter, often the rhetorical technique of the gold bug is to predict a coming apocalypse and then immediately sell you the only means there is to protect you from the worst.

I think there’s that accelerationism visible right now on the far right, certainly in the United States."

jacobin.com/2025/04/race-scien

jacobin.comThe Method in the Far Right’s MadnessToday’s far right manages to combine the call for economic freedom with pseudoscience about natural hierarchies of race and IQ. Historian Quinn Slobodian explains how these ideas can be fitted together.

→ How I Went Undercover to Expose America’s Nazis
thewalrus.ca/how-i-went-underc

“I think #accelerationism is the most dangerous and overlooked threat facing us today. […] [I]t has never had such a widespread following in the white #supremacist community. […] What they do believe is #society will eventually #collapse, either on its own or from a man-made event, and their goal is to speed that up by sowing #chaos and #political tensions. To accelerate it.”

The Walrus · How I Went Undercover to Expose America’s Nazis | The WalrusAccelerationist groups are in overdrive to establish a white ethno-state. As an FBI special agent, I infiltrated one

"The third program that underpins the present moment is often described as a project of right-wing accelerationism. That term is usually associated with Curtis Yarvin, the former computer programmer and amateur poet who was graced with a long interview in The New York Times just after the election (His idea of RAGE—Retire All Government Employees—looks a lot like that of DOGE). Characters like him and the British philosopher Nick Land are freefloating intellectuals without institutional bases beyond their episodic newsletters, articles, and blogs. Yarvin has questioned his own influence, suggesting that his ideas make their way into the Republican ecosystem through staffers who swim in a “very online soup.” Yet even if their direct impact cannot be tracked in a simple flow chart, their work more accurately captures the tech right’s spirit than Burnhamite conservatism, C-suite vampirism, or the Jesus-dipped language of millenarian struggle.

What do they see? Right-wing accelerationists imagine existing sovereignty shattering into what Yarvin, writing under the pen name Mencius Moldbug, calls a “patchwork” of private entities, ideally governed by what one might call technomonarchies. Existing autocratic polities like Dubai serve as rough prototypes for how nations could be dismantled into “a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions.” These would be decentralized archipelagoes: fortified nodes in a circuitry still linked by finance, trade, and communication. Think of the year 1000 in Middle Europe but with vertical take-off and landing taxis and Starlink internet."

nybooks.com/online/2025/02/15/

The New York Review of BooksSpeed Up the Breakdown | Quinn SlobodianFor the last month, the US opinion-making class has stared agog as Elon Musk and his minions have stormed the engine room of the federal government. Young
#USA#Trump#Musk
Continued thread

#Accelerationism and degrowth, though seemingly incompatible, share commonalities in their pursuit of utopian ideals and critiques of existing systems.

Accelerationism focuses on leveraging technology and automation to transcend #capitalism, often advocating for a “fully automated luxury communism” through increased efficiency and social change.

www.linkedin.comGuido Palazzo on LinkedIn: Civilizations did rise when they built up bureaucracies. These… | 63 commentsCivilizations did rise when they built up bureaucracies. These super-structures emerged in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China as a response to the increasing complexity of organizing large populations, managing resources, and maintaining social order. Writing systems were developed to record transactions, legal codes, property rights and state decrees. A dysfunctional bureaucracy can lead to inefficiencies, corruption, and the inability to respond to crises, making a civilization vulnerable to collapse. If you want to kill a civilization, fuel the collapse of social order, destroy its administrative power first. Elon Musk is executing the program of Accelerationism – the libertarian ideology of Silicon Valley. For their techno-utopian vision of the future, liberal democracies are too weak, and too slow. They are the enemy of a bright future that only the acceleration of technological progress can bring. “We believe in accelerationism – the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development – to ensure the fulfillment of the Law of Accelerating Returns. To ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever.” Marc Andreessen writes this in his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”. "Democracy and freedom are incompatible", Peter Thiel concurs.   Andreessen's favorite intellectual is the Italian Futurist and early Italian Fascist thinker Filippo Tommaso Marinetti who in his own Manifesto del Futurismo (1909) wrote “We want to glorify the War - the only hygiene of the world… the destructive gesture of the libertarians, the beautiful ideas for which we die… “We want to destroy museums, libraries, academies…, and fight against moralism, feminism and against all…utilitarian cowardice.” "The professors are the enemy", the new US Vicepresident translates this into modern language.   Destruction is part of the program. Everything must be smashed so that the transhumanist society can flourish on the debris of liberal democracies.   Closing USAID is also part of the program. Effective altruism – the philanthropic arm of the transhumanists – considers any help for the weak or any engagement with the problems of the present a waste of money. The focus must be on what promotes a far away bright future of humankind. The weak must die so that Homo Deus can live. The focus of investments must be on rockets and mind-machine fusion.   Conservative Christians in the USA love the destruction of liberal democracies as well – anything that looks like chaos will bring Jesus back faster. The disruption of Silicon Valley and the Rapture of those fundamentalist Christians are perfectly aligned.   Basically, it is just the new version of Hayek’s good old neoliberalism: radically free markets (for tech companies in particular), weak governments, moral control via the Christian family values. You just add a secular paradise: The singularity moment, when man and machine fuse and we become immortal gods ourselves.   It looks like madness. It’s a program. | 63 comments on LinkedIn

Back in 2015 or so, during the last days of The Galilean Library forum, I was deep in conversation with this devotee of the Dark Enlightenment, preaching the gospel of Nick Land, a philosopher who fled to China & became a prophet of techno-nihilism. That's when I found out about #accelerationism

A theory that reads like Marxism, but put thru a paper shredder & reassembled by a machine that hates people.

Digital elites and reactionary modernism

From Wikipedia:

Reactionary modernism is a term first coined by Jeffrey Herf[1] in the 1980s to describe the mixture of “great enthusiasm for modern technology with a rejection of the Enlightenment and the values and institutions of liberal democracy” that was characteristic of the German Conservative Revolutionary movement and Nazism.[2] In turn, this ideology of reactionary modernism was closely linked to the original, positive view of the Sonderweg, which saw Germany as the great Central European power, neither of the West nor of the East.

From John Ganz on this Peter Thiel op-ed:

When Thiel writes about a “war on the internet” and “the internet” that had “begun our liberation,” the natural assumption is to assume that he’s speaking figuratively, that this is a metonym or synecdoche meaning “people on the internet.” But let’s say he’s being literal: for Thiel, the internet is a subject, it is doing something and the machines, The Big Machine has agency—it is “agentic,” as the tech people like to say. This is the viewpoint of the “Dark Enlightenment” and “neo-reaction,” which forms part of Thiel’s intellectual milieu. The belief is that a technological singularity is coming and the elect must work to accelerate it. The state must organize itself like an enterprise for this work to be completed. Progress, which is hampered by democracy, must have an authoritarian state to continue unabated. This is, of course, reactionary modernism: a belief in technological advances without the sentimental baggage of the Enlightenment.

https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/reading-thiels-op-ed

en.wikipedia.orgJeffrey Herf - Wikipedia