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My argument about acceleration is an argument about Time, and our relationship to Time. So, on this, the 15th anniversary of my second SA forums account, I thought I would drop in on this thread, and talk to you a little bit about how understanding the concept of acceleration is essential to making sense over what is happening in our world today. I do not need to cite any sources to justify the obvious and invariable observation that all empires and nations follow an essentially parabolic path when it comes to a representation of their fortunes. They begin with some quickening, some movement or personality or idea that unites them and provides impulse and impetus to cause the rise of their fortunes. This impetus has sufficient novelty to propel the culture upward and onward, with a fairly consistent velocity, up to some plateau of stability. There is all sorts of space for cycles within cycles throughout this process, but eventually, the culture loses its coherency, and a kind of deceleration begins. This deceleration can be staved off temporarily, but as we have no exception to the rule that all nations and empires and countries must eventually fall from their peak of dominance, it appears reasonable that once we begin to detect the decline of a nation, that the only thing we can REALLY do is either allow the deceleration to take a stochastic path, or to actively engage with the inevitable, and try to direct the landing into something more controlled than a crash.  quote:From bottom to top: My contention is that most people observe politics, for example, upon the level of either distance or velocity. They ask questions about what's happening right now, assuming that whatever context has existed will CONTINUE to exist, even when the graph is starting to bend. When it comes to questions about the force or importance of ideologies, they take what's happening instantaneously, and unconsciously fit it into a narrative that assumes the stability of the factors they take for granted. For physicists, this means creating a parabolic chart of a perfectly-spherical, massless airplane, in a vacuum, the whole concept of ceteris paribus. For most people politically, right now, it means assuming that the political and economic systems and structures we have known, perhaps for the past few hundred years, will, of course, continue to right themselves and continue chugging merrily on. From a higher perspective, simply observing rates of change, deeper conclusions may be drawn. We may be able to look at structural changes in the game and note important inflection points that have changed the rules. Obviously, within current American politics, we can look at the Democratic-to-Republican inversion of the Southern Strategy as a prime example where something WITHIN the system underwent a massive inversion. Broader-scale change was enabled by this larger-scale shift: it's easy to causally track that change to the origin of Reagan and everything else he brought with him. However, if we continue to step back, we can look at the entire path of a nation's trajectory, or the trajectory even of entire paradigms of economic systems, like the capitalism/communism divide, and not simply get stuck in some lovely Marxist definition of "acceleration", with its stupid "endpoint of history" certainty that capitalism will fail and that communism will emerge triumphant. Instead, we can see those two ideas as a binary on a single continuum, a continuum that, over Time, is crashing both ideas simultaneously. We are currently, in my opinion, in a very clear deceleration phase of the entire work-based, industrial, wealth- and nation-oriented world system. If I were to think about this from a question of the rates of change of the rates of change of the fortunes of the world, I could find many examples to substantiate my position that we are now in a clear phase where we are accelerating towards a systemic collapse. What has been disappearing in American politics is, increasingly, the idea that our system has any structural validity whatsoever. It has come out of balance with itself, and we are no longer in a space where the concept of checks and balances apply. In terms of our economy, there is no longer any space for the poor to assert themselves against the rich, and we have undergone SUCH acceleration of this trend that the very idea of striking, or protesting, or imagining a different economic system in America is not even possible. I can ask, and HAVE asked every person claiming to be interested in our politics on these forums to provide me with a realistic, believable pattern by which a balance between the rich and poor might be practically reinstated, and all I get in return is deflecting insults, which I must forgive, because the blindingly obvious answer is that this sort of rebalancing is not now even mentally imaginable. On a meta-level, we are not even able to have a coherent thought about how the trend of the increase of velocity of the upward distribution of wealth might be even reduced, let alone stalled, and god forbid REVERSED. Even arguing about slowing this process down is now completely pointless, because it has become recursively applied to itself. The time to slow down the VELOCITY of wealth inequality was in the 80s. After 2008, it became clear that the system had applied itself exponentially to itself, and at that inflection point, we COULD have attempted a vast and very painful DECELERATION of the exponential wealth transfer going on. But now, having failed to think on a high enough level, having wasted years in thought about the distance between fortunes and not their rate of change or the acceleration of their rate, we are now past the point where change is possible. We can map out the exact same process when it comes to the question of climate change. We are now well and firmly past the point where any actual change is possible. There has never before been a situation where human culture has applied itself to itself to such a grand extent that the entire climate of the planet might be irreparably ruined. We COULD have noted the positional change in climate and its connection to fossil fuel consumption in the 70s and made a difficult change. We COULD have noted the velocity of the change in that change in the 90s, and made an even more difficult change. In the 2000s, we had a chance to recognize that climate change was not just increasing in velocity, but increasing in acceleration. Out of all this rambling, I wish to draw out a single point: taken rationally, I argue that it is now simply TOO LATE to put cats back in bags, TOO LATE to halt the recursive progression of climate change, and TOO LATE to decelerate the shitshow that is American politics. We are in a downward spiral that is not simply national, but global in scale. My challenge to anyone remains the same: to formulate a counter-argument that is not just a dismissive "Oh, things always get better, and people have been yelling about the end of the world since Cicero!", but to explain in detail how we can reverse the acceleration of politics towards complete separation from the concept of the public good and sane governance. I demand that someone make a believable case for HOW we are going to convince the whole world to reverse the process of climate destruction, to fend off what India and China are going to do as their consumption increases. And most importantly, I demand that you explain how our current systems manage to solve all of these problems WITHIN their own structures, WITHOUT some grand and extremely unpleasant overturning and revolution. Time is simply not on our side any more. Time has very much become our enemy. The longer it takes for us to make drastic changes, the more the problem accelerates in severity. I'm not even pretending to have an answer right now: I am simply asking for anyone to dare to refute the position that I am establishing. Because if you DO accept that things are exactly as dangerous as I say, how do you justify continuing to luxuriate in business as usual? In my personal life, I am doing what I can to spread my message, to make movements and choices that put into practice what I am preaching. When I talk on here, I speak simply from a position of having observed this discussion space through many of its changes, and hoping that people will snap out of the complacency that causes them to reject what I say and dismissively just watch as the world hurtles ever more quickly into an uncontrolled acceleration towards complete detonation.
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Jan 25, 2016 00:10
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| # ¿ May 8, 2024 13:11 |
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Ddraig posted:I believe in Accelerationism, not because I believe or even hope that the world will suddenly realize that they've been going wrong all this time, but because I believe the human species as a whole is fundamentally unworthy of continued existence so the sooner we gently caress off and let others have a chance the better off the world, and all its inhabitants who aren't us, will be. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Mar 4, 2016 00:04
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