Wheeee posted:

You are advocating giving up in a manner that allows you to continue stroking your ego, making you a fool and a coward.

Willie Tomg posted:

Accelerationism does not assume this.


Accelerationism does not assume this.


Accelerationism does not require this.

Willie Tomg posted:

Accelerationism does not mean "actively make things worse, then Full Communism Now, naturally, of course". It assumes only that a capitalistic economic organization trends toward a crisis point where hegemonic order breaks down into its constituent parts, and that meaningful opposition in a contemporary period is futile conflict for conflict's sake that at best destroys lots for no gain. Recognizing those two facts, Accelerationism then proposes that the only way capital-C Capital will be broken down (note: not destroyed) is to allow Capital to run freely to that crisis point and allow history to proceed.

Willie Tomg posted:

It's pessimistic as gently caress and not hugely academic, but since when the gently caress has political academia mattered a second squirt of piss to anything IRL? Besides: it's fun. It's fun to confront leftists with the reality of their loser failure ideology which decisively and utterly and irretrievably lost the Cold War. It's fun to see liberals attempt to quickly improvise as they realize in the moment that for all their veneration of progress as an end in and of itself, they haven't put much thought into what specifically is being progressed toward.

Venomous posted:

Relevant point for this thread in this interview with the Pirate Bay's founder. He argues that the Internet has become too centralised and tied to capital across its existence, and that there's nothing we can do at this point to ensure a free and open Internet. The way to win the war, he says, is to abolish capitalism entirely by letting it run free, which reminded me of this thread.

[snip]

Personally I'd say he's a bit too optimistic about how quickly automation will occur, but I can't know for certain. Interesting though.

quote:

There is going to be a lot of fear, lost blood, and lost lives to get to that point, but I think that’s the only positive thing I see, that we are going to have a total system collapse in the future. Hopefully as quick as possible. I would rather be 50 then be like 85 when the system is crashing.

VitalSigns posted:

Millionaire web developer supports unfettered capitalism that will condemn the poor to a miserable hell but have little impact on his own standard of living, news at 11.

Willie Tomg posted:

No, my position for the purposes of this specific thread because y'all are gormless limpid fuckers who cannot rebut the apocalypse is that Capitalism has created an edifice that has destroyed base leftist populism. My cite for that is the last 30 years of world history. Let it create further still for only wonders portend. My cite for that is the last century.

terms like "worse" or "better" are gadflies for losers. Que sera sera, and internet posters will comment upon it I'm sure.

Quidam Viator posted:

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.

Quidam Viator posted:

Quidam Viator posted:

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.

Quidam Viator posted:

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.

Quidam Viator posted:

What has been disappearing in American politics is, increasingly, the idea that our system has any structural validity whatsoever.

Quidam Viator posted:

It has come out of balance with itself, and we are no longer in a space where the concept of checks and balances apply.

Quidam Viator posted:

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.

Quidam Viator posted:

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.

Quidam Viator posted:

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.

Quidam Viator posted:

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.

Quidam Viator posted:

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.