Accelerationism

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Accelerationism (from English acceleration , dt. Acceleration or lat. Accelerare , accelerate, hurry, convey, promote, rush, hurry ) describes a philosophical school of thought developed by the philosopher Nick Land and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) in was founded in the 1990s at Warwick University and has now differentiated into several left and right currents. Central is the view of capitalism as an accelerating process of deterritorialization, which cannot be overcome and which is moving towards a posthumanist world. However, the individual currents of accelerationism disagree as to what consequences this will have for humanity, whether it will die out or survive.

For some years the term accelerationism has also been used to denote strategies of political extremists who want to bring about a collapse of society through terrorism, but such tactical accelerationisms have nothing to do with accelerationism itself.

Basics

Nick Land theorized, building on Karl Marx and the theories of Deleuze and Guattari in his texts, that Karl Marx was largely right in his analysis of capitalism , but underestimated capitalism's ability to constantly adapt and accelerate. Nick Land prophesies that the end of capitalism will not result in the self-destruction of capitalism and the liberation of mankind from it, as Karl Marx had predicted, but the liberation of capital from mankind. According to Nick Land, capitalism is not irrational, it has no real dialectical contradictions in itself - rather the contradictions arise from the human component in the system. Because capitalism disintegrates and destroys everything that does not fit into its constantly rationalizing processes, according to Land at its end it will dissolve the contradictions generated by man through the disintegration of man. Capitalism will therefore not destroy itself but humans. Either through a transhumanistic transformation of humans or through their extinction, which paves the way into a new civilization of machines and artificial intelligences, which together form a singularity .

Leftist currents of accelerationism deviate from Nick Land's prognosis and hope to create a post-capitalist society through the use of the technological innovations brought about by capitalism accelerating towards singularity.

Accelerationist manifesto

In “Postcapitalism and a World without Work” the authors of the “Accelerationist Manifesto” Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams justify a leftist concept of accelerationism primarily with a political deficiency. In their view, the left has withdrawn to local and horizontal forms of politics (so-called “folks politics”) and thus left the field to neoliberalism. As a result, any change seems impossible today. A political counter-movement not only requires a large-scale strategy to achieve hegemony, but also a utopian counter-narrative. The technical progress, which today already makes a life with drastically reduced working hours possible, shows such a positive counter-perspective.

See also

source

literature

  • Armen Avanessian (Ed.): #Acceleration. Merve, Berlin 2013, Introduction (PDF)
  • Armen Avanessian, Robin Mackay (eds.): # Acceleration # 2. Merve, Berlin 2014.
  • Nick Land: Fanged Noumena. Collected Writings 1987-2007 . Urbanomic, 2011, ISBN 9780955308789
  • Robin Mackay: ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader . Urbanomic, 2014, ISBN 9780957529557 .
  • Benjamin Noys: Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism . Zero Books, 2013, ISBN 9781782793007 .
  • Nick Srnicek / Alex Williams: Inventing the Future. Postcapitalism and a World without Work Verso Books : London / New York 2015, ISBN 9781784780982

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ What is accelerationism? Retrieved on August 29, 2020 .
  2. ↑ A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism. In: Jacobite. May 25, 2017. Retrieved August 29, 2020 (American English).
  3. ↑ Accelerationism Part 2: / acc - Capital is an AI In: Leveret Pale. August 28, 2020, accessed on August 29, 2020 (German).
  4. ^ Inventing the Future
  5. ↑ Acceleration Manifesto ( Memento from May 19, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  6. ^ "The Escapism of the Accelerators", review by Raul Zelik, WOZ November 12, 2015