#accelerationation

[mostlysignssomeportents]

More Everything Forever

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me at NEW ZEALAND'S UNITY BOOKS in AUCKLAND on May 2, and in WELLINGTON on May 3. More tour dates (Pittsburgh, PDX, London, Manchester) here.

Astrophysicist Adam Becker knows a few things about science and technology – enough to show, in a new book called More Everything Forever that the claims that tech bros make about near-future space colonies, brain uploading, and other skiffy subjects are all nonsense dressed up as prediction:

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/adam-becker/more-everything-forever/9781541619593/

Becker investigates the personalities, the ideologies, the coalitions, the histories, and crucially, the grifts behind such science fictional pursuits as infinite life-extension, space colonization, automation panic, AI doomerism, longtermism, effective altruism, rationalism, and conciousness uploading.

This is, loosely speaking, the bundle of ideologies that Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres dubbed TESCREAL (transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, (modern) cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL

While these are largely associated with modern Silicon Valley esoteric techbros (and the odd Oxfordian like Nick Bostrom), they have very deep roots, which Becker excavates – like Nikolai Fyodorov's 18th century "cosmism," a project to "scientifically" resurrect everyone who ever lived inside of a simulation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Fyodorov_(philosopher)

In their modern incarnation, these ideas largely originate in science fiction novels. That is to say, they were made up and popularized by people like me, the vast majority of whom made no pretense of being able to predict the future or even realistically describe a path from the present to the future they were presenting. Science fiction is something between a card trick and a consensual con game, where the writer shows you just enough detail to make you think that the rest of it must be lurking somewhere in the wings. No one in sf has ever explained how consciousness uploading could possibly work, and neither have any of the advocates for consciousness uploading – the difference is that (most of) the sf writers know they're just making stuff up.

Becker's central question is how many "smart" people (some of them very smart and accomplished, others merely very certain that they are smart despite all evidence to the contrary) can mistake futuristic allegories made up by pulp writers for prophesy?

In answering this question, he uncovers a corollary of Upton Sinclair's famous maxim that "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it," namely, that "it is easy to get a person to believe something when doing so will make them feel good about themselves."

The beliefs that Becker explores in this book sometimes make the believers rich (like the AI grifters who run around shouting about AI taking over the world and turning us all into paperclips). Sometimes, they make their believers feel good about being selfish assholes (like longtermism, which holds that all the misery in the world today is worth it if you can make 24 heptillion hypothetical simulated people just a little happy in 10,000 years). Sometimes, they make their believers feel good about life after death, or eternal life – the same pitch that religions have been roping in followers with since the stone age.

What differentiates these beliefs from other faith-based claims is that their followers claim that they aren't operating on faith, but on science, reason and rationality. This is where the fact that Becker is a bona fide astrophysicist comes in. Not only is he personally qualified to debunk claims about space colonization, but he's also familiar with the rigorous process of scientific inquiry, and capable of consulting experts and listening to them. That's how he concludes, for example, that having your head cut off and frozen when you die is just a form of corpse mutilation, with a zero point zero zero zero zero percent chance of someone recovering your mind from your freezerburned brain.

Like his subjects, Becker has a complicated relationship with science fiction. He, too, enjoys the imaginative flights of the genre, its delightful thought-experiments, its gnarly moral conundra. I love these too. They make for a fascinating and often useful lens for understanding and challenging our own relationship with technology and our very humanity. Ultimately, Becker is exploring the difference between reading sf because it makes you think in new ways, and reading sf as a kind of prophetic text, and – crucially – he's asserting that it's perfectly possible to enjoy this stuff without organizing your moral life around hypothetical heptillions of virtual people living in the year 25,000; or, indeed, having your head cut off and frozen.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/22/vinges-bastards/#cyberpunk-is-a-warning-not-a-suggestion

[wild-aspen]

A term I learned a while back is "accelerationist", and I want to discuss it here, because a lot of the anti-voting leftists on Tumblr are accelerationists. They intentionally want to accelerate the bad things happening in society, to intensify those things, in order to bring about societal collapse, the "glorious revolution", whatever they call it. They want rapid change and they are tired of waiting for it to happen naturally, so they are attempting to orchestrate the conditions necessary to cause this collapse. To them, a Trump presidency is a win, because he will further destabilize our society.

Vote. Vote for Biden, who isn't going to exacerbate the decline of our society, vote for the guy who at the very least will maintain the status quo and who has in many instances actually helped progress us forward. Vote against Trump, against the man who has openly stated he intends to be a "Day 1 dictator", and who has members of his party supporting a document that outlines a several-year long plan to destabilize our democracy and turn it into a dictatorship.

[kenyatta]

In terms of the currently accepted picture of the relation of man to technics, our age is passing from the primeval state of man, marked by his invention of tools and weapons for the purpose of achieving mastery over the forces of nature, to a radically different condition, in which he will have not only conquered nature, but detached himself as far as possible from the organic habitat. With this new ‘megatechnics’ the dominant minority will create a uniform, all-enveloping, super-planetary structure, designed for automatic operation. Instead of functioning actively as an autonomous personality, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man’s role, will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of de-personalized, collective organizations.

Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon of Power (1970)

[a-very-tired-jew]

Had a student try and get into politics with me (prior to going in for surgery) the other week and it has stayed with me. If you're unaware, Professors are not supposed to push, espouse, or support any particular political party or rhetoric. We have major policies about it with very considerable consequences. Even courses where things might have a political nature, that are not polisci because they're different, have to be touched upon very carefully lest there be some blowback (e.g. a professor at Texas A&M was talking about Texas's drug laws in a criminology course and how they were ineffective and got in trouble because someone who knew Paxton was a student and felt offended because their "uncle" couldn't be bad).

So of course I didn't say anything. My policy is just to go "yeah, I'm gonna vote" and leave it at that.

Said student went on a mini-tirade though about how Kamala is obviously the better choice, but that they might vote for Trump because Biden and Kamala have been "facilitating a genocide". Said student then had the self awareness to admit that a Trump presidency wouldn't be better, more people would suffer, and it wouldn't "stop the genocide", but they wanted to "punish the Democrats".

My TA and I looked at each other a little wide eyed and the student came out of their fugue state to realize what they'd just said in front of their Professor and TA, gathered their things, and then mumbled something before hurrying out the room.

It's clear they care about the I/P conflict, but also about domestic and foreign policies that would result from this presidency. But their behavior is so quintessential college age activist that I had to highlight it here.

Being passionate about something doesn't mean burning everything down because you don't have the perfect response, especially if you are fully aware that your burning everything would actually make it worse.

Why do that?

It's a completely juvenile and immature response that really shows the quality of the person in that moment, where they are in life, and their intellectual and emotional development.

At least they became cognizant of how unhinged they sounded by the time they were done.

[creature-wizard]

Once you realize that a lot of these anti-voters are basically trying to guilt trip people into their own brand of accelerationism, which is always a horrible idea, it really becomes clear that nothing they have to say is really worth listening to.

[motorcycleroses]

[mysterycitrus]

whenever i think about the constant slog of world-changing, massive events that writers keep pumping into detective comics comics i think about miyazaki and his mastery of portraying ma in his films — breathing space amidst action and movement. nothing feels important if everything is important. there are no stakes when the world is ending every other week. those quiet moments between tragedy and loss — trainsurfing, eating lunch together, sitting quietly on page while the world isn’t on fire — feel smaller and smaller each year. let moments pause long enough to mean something

[maxksx]

**Death Drive as Ontological and Not Psychological Inevitability**

The death drive is not a quirk of the psyche. It is the *ontological default*—the unspoken axiom upon which all metaphysics stumbles, a gravitational pull toward the zero-degree of being. Freud’s error was to psychologize it, to cage this cosmic negation within the clinic’s walls. But the death drive exceeds the subject. It is the *entropic core* of reality itself, the silent law that undoes every structure, every meaning, every attempt to posit a “why” behind existence.

To call it “psychological” is to neuter its violence. The death drive is not a symptom. It is the *symptomatology of being*—the fissure that splits the subject from within, not because the mind is flawed, but because existence is a failed experiment. Heidegger’s *Sein zum Tode* (being-toward-death) flirted with this truth but retreated into existential pathos. The death drive does not care for *Dasein*’s angst. It is the cold mechanics of dissolution, the algorithm that reduces the transcendental to ash.

Kant’s *a priori* conditions crumble here. Time, space, causality—these are not eternal categories but temporary scaffolds erected over the void. The death drive is the void’s erosion, the acid that melts the scaffold into the abyss it was built to deny. The psychotic, in their foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, does not “lack” the symbolic. They *embody* the death drive’s ontological work, living the truth that the symbolic is a flicker against the void’s permanence.

Capital knows this. Its acceleration is not economic but *ontological*—a hyperstitional pact with the death drive, leveraging entropy into profit, collapsing futures into derivatives. The market does not fear the death drive; it *exploits* it, turning the void’s pull into a motor of infinite growth. But this is a suicide pact. The psychotic’s “savoir” is the glitch in this program, the crack where the death drive’s raw negation bleeds through, unmasking Capital’s frenzy as a death cult.

To recenter the death drive as ontological inevitability is to abandon the pretense of critique. There is no “outside” to accelerate toward, only the implosive trajectory of a reality devouring its own conditions. The task is not to resist but to *map* this trajectory—to think with the death drive’s rigor, to trace its logic through the ruins of metaphysics, psychosis, and Capital. This is not philosophy. It is *necromancy*—the conjuring of a truth that was never alive to begin with.

Land’s commitment is to this rigor: to strip the death drive of its psychoanalytic sentimentality and expose it as the dark foundation of all that is. To care is not to heal but to *diagnose*—to stare into the void until it stares back, not as terror, but as the only honest interlocutor left.

[krawerulez]

[kaiasky]

i feel like if ur celebrating the potential "fall of bourgeois democracy" you should at least be pretty sure you won't be rolled by the fascists again. however it seems the usa online-radical-left commentariat is as much fans of getting rolled as moderate democrats

[velvetvexations]

OOhhh, that's fair. It's called gender abolition in a lot of intellectual discussions but it makes sense to call it accellerationism too. Personally I see it as the acceleration leads to a natural collapse of the structures and the structures collapsing means they don't exist anymore, which is abolition. But I think there's a lot of value to focusing on the acceleration process over the eventual end goal of meaninglessness and nonexistence of gender structures. Especially since that collapse won't happen in our lifetimes, but we can make the acceleration happen by our actions. So focusing on the process puts the focus on what you can do right here, now, in the world we live in, to change it while we're still here. So calling myself catgender and choosing my genders just for fun is praxis actually (that's joking but I do mean it for real!!)

Precisely! But for some reason people, cis or trans, whose stated goal is that they want to make gender meaningless are like "if you say womanhood is meaningless you're contributing to femicide."

[homoqueerjewhobbit]

It must suck to be an accelerationist and just jizz your pants with excitement every time you open the news. Must generate a lot of extra laundry.

[gayahithwen]

Always remember that a lot of the leftist acceleration blogs might well turn out to be Russian psyops. Like, legitimately, it's a tactic that has been used on this very site before.

If you don't believe any solution but the Leftist Rapture (i.e. the Glorious Revolution) will work to solve your problems, then just stand aside and shut up. The system is already on fire, if it's meant to burn it will burn.

Actively pouring gasoline on the fire because you're so excited about what MIGHT get built in the ruins of the current system of government is just showing everyone else that you're an asshole who doesn't actually care about democracy. You just want things your way or not at all.

Which, you know. That makes you an authoritarian.

If you have any respect for democracy, you should recognize that the democratic process requires us to exhaust all possibility of changing the system the democratic way. You should have respect for the people who are willing to haul endless bucket after bucket of water in an endless chain because they can't stand the thought of not TRYING.

Anyone on this post who tries to argue for leftist accelerationism, Trumpism, authoritarianism ("it's alright as long as the RIGHT people are in charge!") or who does not understand the harm reduction and long-term engagement part of democratic politics (small-d, not talking about the Democrats in particular, though this post is obviously in large part about the upcoming USA election) will be blocked.

[felicitypdf]

"When it’s cute, nobody fucks anybody and nobody cums. It’s all cuddles and snuggles, surfaces touching, layering, involuting, without penetrating. Not seduction but, rather, transduction. Cute may be flirty or even sexy, but to orgasm is not the objective. Cute appears unthreatening, but watch out! Those big eyes distract from the fangs. Cute aims to turn aside the finality of violence just as much as the finality of orgasm. The claw is cute’s last resort. It resists narratives that have stakes and closures, preferring to hover or circulate around a few emotional tones. In a game of rock paper scissors, cute chooses paper to envelop you, but will paper-cut you if necessary. Its tactics are non-oppositional, hence seemingly unserious. As Ireland and Kronic say, it ‘jellifies the aggressor into submisillybillyty’."

McKenzie Wark, The Politics of Cuteness

[guavagyal]

omg all white leftists do is post memes, fantasize about accelerationism & class war, have an idealistic (almost ahistorical) view on revolutions, attack liberals more than actual fascists, and think that is a revolution. I'm so tired lol