Accelerationism

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I'm asserting, as I said, that your scenario was Science Fiction and would not happen.
On what basis can you make that claim?

You're being silly to suggest that means all Sci-Fi is therefore impossible, given Sci-Fi is a very broad genre, given I didn't say that. I'm sure there's a neat term to describe people who exaggerate their opponent's argument in a discussion in order to try and make them sound unrealistic. Also, 1984 is not North Korea and was written in the fall-out from WWII when zones of control were being divvied up by the Allies, and when propaganda, surveillance, militarism, etc. had all been in full force throughout the war. It is also heavily influenced by the Russian novel We written after the Communist revolution there. It's ideas bring together most of those concepts with a some exaggeration.
Please find an editor and stop assuming you're talking to people who know nothing.
Real life scenarios inspired books like these and those real life things still happen in part. Real life, both past and present, is a very good indicator of how things will happen in real life. Where are the real life examples that feed into your widespread dystopian scenario?
The demise and increasing rates of death through despair in the working class of the US among other things that demonstrate a sharp negative turn for those at the front line of accelerating capitalism.

The greatest flaw IMO in your and/or the author's scenario is that technological change is gradual.
No it isn't.

There is zero reason to think huge swathes of under-employed people would not act as technology gradually pushed more and more people out of meaningful work.
Act how?

This is not the way humans behave. And of course rich people are humans too, and are not going to want to persecute billions of people, nor enjoy living in comfort in the knowledge that billions of people out there would love to kill them if only they could get past Skynet or whatever you're imagining. It's Science Fiction and can be enjoyed as such - apocryphal warnings and all.
This is actually exactly how humans behave. Whenever a significantly advanced society encounters a lesser society, the lesser society ends up being exterminated. The pre-Industrial revolution Europeans extinguished every hunter gatherer society they encountered and the subsequent Industrialised societies of the 19th century continued that pattern. There is also accumulated archaeological evidence that the first Agriculural Revolution spurred the development of war and the invention of slavery.

If your belief is that the AI revolution will be a continuation of the Industrial Revolution and societies structures will continue as normal, then you're going against a lot of academic thought that suggests instead this will more closely resemble a phase shift like the development of agriculture or the Industrial revolution, which had severe consequences for those peoples that were ill prepared for it.


Oh, and the joy people get from Sci-Fi is the same reason the internet is full of people spreading conspiracy theories or trying to suggest the world is getting darker and darker. We like grand stories. But it is entertainment. Real life is different.
Is it your contention that we have reached the end of history and that the status quo will continue indefinitely?
 

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On what basis can you make that claim?


Please find an editor and stop assuming you're talking to people who know nothing.

The demise and increasing rates of death through despair in the working class of the US among other things that demonstrate a sharp negative turn for those at the front line of accelerating capitalism.


No it isn't.

Act how?


This is actually exactly how humans behave. Whenever a significantly advanced society encounters a lesser society, the lesser society ends up being exterminated. The pre-Industrial revolution Europeans extinguished every hunter gatherer society they encountered and the subsequent Industrialised societies of the 19th century continued that pattern. There is also accumulated archaeological evidence that the first Agriculural Revolution spurred the development of war and the invention of slavery.

If your belief is that the AI revolution will be a continuation of the Industrial Revolution and societies structures will continue as normal, then you're going against a lot of academic thought that suggests instead this will more closely resemble a phase shift like the development of agriculture or the Industrial revolution, which had severe consequences for those peoples that were ill prepared for it.



Is it your contention that we have reached the end of history and that the status quo will continue indefinitely?
So you think technological change won't be gradual and it will leap ahead to such an extent that it will be like an advanced society rocking up on the shores of a hunter-gatherer society. I don't share this opinion.

As for the OP, Land seems to be a guy who has acknowledged that right-wing ideas fail at the voting booth and so the only way to instate them is through abandoning democracy. This is not an actual reason for the demise of democracy. And of course, there is inherent hypocrisy in right-wingers saying they will restore what they perceived to be a moral and civilised normal, but alas they will do it through undemocratic, immoral means.
 

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So you think technological change won't be gradual and it will leap ahead to such an extent that it will be like an advanced society rocking up on the shores of a hunter-gatherer society. I don't share this opinion.
Technological change is punctuated by leaps and only seems gradual in restrospect because the significance of the developments become absorbed into the status quo.

The agricultural revolution caused enormous suffering for many and it is only that we as the descendants of the survivors of it can look back at it as good.

Same could be said about the mechanisation of war and oppression seen in the 19th and early 20th century. We can look back at the development of industry as good safe in the knowledge we didn't suffer the worst effects of it.

As for the OP, Land seems to be a guy who has acknowledged that right-wing ideas fail at the voting booth and so the only way to instate them is through abandoning democracy. This is not an actual reason for the demise of democracy. And of course, there is inherent hypocrisy in right-wingers saying they will restore what they perceived to be a moral and civilised normal, but alas they will do it through undemocratic, immoral means.
Land lives in Shanghai and thinks the Chinese system of government is the best possible, so I'd say he doesn't care one way or another about the voting booth.
 

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Gotta say..I'm lost.
 
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Gotta say..I'm lost.

Technological break-throughs & advancements are becoming quicker & quicker, and far more broader in their range, scope & magnitude on our lives. As well as cutting deeper in their affect on the need for traditional human labor. (The laboring under-class).

As agriculture & industry changed our landscapes, so too will Artificial intelligence (robotics, cybernetics etc) RE: Alvin Tofflers Third Wave & Future shock

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Wave_(Toffler_book)

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

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Democracy doesn't have to be given up by the majority it just has to be rendered useless. Imagine a scenario where all unskilled labor is replaced by machines, resulting in unemployment rates of 40% or larger.

Interesting the discussion of Gramsci, fascism, and "democracy" narrowly defined came up in the latest Jacobin.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/08/trump-clinton-fascism-authoritarian-democracy/

So yes, I do think that Gramsci’s work can help to understand some elements of the far right in Europe, as well as the Trump phenomenon in the United States.

Part of the strength of these movements, like interwar fascism itself, lies in their ability to articulate some basic democratic demands: the idea that political institutions need to be removed from the hands of a corrupt parliamentary clique and made responsible again to the people, and so on. In conditions where these sorts of demands cannot be satisfied by the Left, the far right will take them up.
...
Democracy is fundamentally what Gaetano Mosca called a “political formula.” It is the claim that a certain type of political institution “represents” the people. Liberalism, in contrast, is a set of procedures (voting, parliamentary representation, and so on).

Now you cannot understand anything about fascist doctrine if you do not understand that their central claim was that liberalism is antidemocratic; in other words, the fascists claimed that liberal institutions cannot represent the will of the people. They further claimed that their typical institutions, particularly the party, were more effective means to represent the will of the people. So fascists were “authoritarian democrats.”

I don't know enough about the rest of Land's philosophy to know if he is claiming a "democratic" mandate or not but you can certainly see elements of it in the tech industry.
 
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Interesting the discussion of Gramsci, fascism, and "democracy" narrowly defined came up in the latest Jacobin.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/08/trump-clinton-fascism-authoritarian-democracy/

I don't know enough about the rest of Land's philosophy to know if he is claiming a "democratic" mandate or not but you can certainly see elements of it in the tech industry
.

He seems to be arguing that the speed of technological change itself, has 'overtaken' democracy as the principal social driving force..... And, will only be hindered by it, as Democracy gets dragged along behind, kicking & screaming....A meritocracy will thereby emerge, as a type of evolutionary, social Darwinist entity.

Anyways, that's my take on it.
 

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Interesting the discussion of Gramsci, fascism, and "democracy" narrowly defined came up in the latest Jacobin.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/08/trump-clinton-fascism-authoritarian-democracy/



I don't know enough about the rest of Land's philosophy to know if he is claiming a "democratic" mandate or not but you can certainly see elements of it in the tech industry.
The rest of Land's philosophy is pretty awful - that's where it dovetails with the broader alt-right on things like race and sex. I wouldn't bother going too much deeper really, it simply rehashes chauvinist and supremacist thought you've probably seen before.

You're right about the elements of it appearing in the tech industry - Peter Thiel being the most prominent example. I don't think there is any claim for a democratic mandate however - I think the Land philosophy sees the people as ultimately unnecessary and the best system of government is one that gets the people to serve capitalism and stops them from impeding it.

In many regards you might argue that's not all that different to the system we have now, which I think Mofra alluded to in this post.

Strangely outside of the commonalities between race/sex/etc there really isn't that much philosophically in tune with the alt-right that is supposedly behind Trump. That is if Trump's statements on trade, his harking back to a golden age and his dim view towards China are to be believed. As Clinton said, on race/sex/etc there's nothing all that different about the alt-right, it's simply the same old lunatic right we've always known. A real alt-right demagogue in the mould of Land's philosophy would be truly scary.
 
He seems to be arguing that the speed of technological change itself, has 'overtaken' democracy as the principal social driving force..... And, will only be hindered by it, as Democracy gets dragged along behind, kicking & screaming....A meritocracy will thereby emerge, as a type of evolutionary, social Darwinist entity.
Reasonable summary - if we're talking justice theory, consider Anonymous and their quasi-social justice campaigns that appear to have stepped in where public demand was not or could not be satisfied by the traditional justice system.

We already have a push for Senate online as a fringe movement which isn't too far removed from the same theory, and many would argue much closer to the ideals of traditional Greek democracy (save for the "only well educated Athens-born males" as participants).
 
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Are you asserting that something being science fiction means it can never happen? I'll let the North Koreans know that 1984 is a work of fiction.

Democracy doesn't have to be given up by the majority it just has to be rendered useless. Imagine a scenario where all unskilled labor is replaced by machines, resulting in unemployment rates of 40% or larger.

The machinery of democratic government acts too slowly to solve the issue of a massive impoverished underclass. What happens then?

Does democracy prevail? Do people revolt? If they revolt against the wealthy, what is the reaction by the wealthy?


In what ways that employ vasts number of people, especially those with below average intelligence?
A scenario where all the unskilled low wage jobs are replaced by machines is a fantastic scenario. No crappy jobs left for people to bore themselves with and all this extra income the government gets to redistribute through taxing the profits created by machines. Higher education would become completely free and everyone would take it up and eventually have advanced specialist jobs where they can earn higher real incomes. Real Prices of goods and low skilled services would also fall as a result of not needing humans to do them. The average working hour weeks would also fall as people realise they don't need to work as much given there much higher real incomes per hour of work and leisure times would expand. The rate of technology development would also likely accelerate as we would have that many more people trained in science and maths leading to a further acceleration in the rate of our standard of living. Bring on your acceleration utopia. I can't wait.
 
Something about robots taking people's jobs and what to do with the masses of unemployed?
The rich wll have the robots broil the unemployed and serve them with a rich meaty jus and a fine crystaline Chianti, between the duck and the suckling pig
 

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The other day, Hillary Clinton made a speech about the 'alt-right', summing it up as a continuation of long-running right wing ideologies that have existed in the US and the world for decades. In many ways this is true, but there is a deeper philosophical underpinning of the 'alt-right' that actually comes from Marxist analyses of capitalism. The key figure behind this philosophy is a bloke from the University of Warwick named Nick Land, and his philosophy is accelerationism.

A primer from September last year (worth reading the whole thing):

https://theawl.com/the-darkness-before-the-right-84e97225ac19#.8jrl1tt3v

Land’s greatest legacy was a philosophy now known as “Accelerationism,” a heady cocktail of nihilism, cybernetic Marxism, complexity theory, numerology, jungle music, and the dystopian sci-fi of William Gibson and Blade Runner. Land identified the critique that progressively dissolved all claims to truth as the philosophical correlate of a capitalist economic system locked in constant revolutionary expansion, moving upwards and outwards on a trajectory of technological and scientific intelligence-generation that would, at the limit, make the leap from its human biological hosts into the great beyond. For Land, as for Nietzsche, the death of God results ultimately in the desire to be destroyed, with capitalism the agent of this destruction.​

The author in the above article goes deeper into the idea below:

https://pmacdougald.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/accelerationism-left-and-right/

Absent LTV [labor theory of value], all that Left Accelerationism can really hope for is a sort of socialist voluntarism that subjects production and exchange to supervenient political aims. But here we’re back to the problem of central planning, and thus have lost whatever libidinal futurist appeal Left Accelerationism had in the first place . More strikingly, absent LTV, the problem posed to humanity by the technological drive of capital is not how to reach the New Jerusalem that the elimination of human labor from the production process will allow, but that this elimination will simply result in humans becoming superfluous to an increasingly autonomic system of machine production. What we will do with a warming planet of 10 billion people when progressively fewer of them can be productively integrated into the global economy, the marginal cost of their labor sinks below the cost of their own social reproduction, and states are obliged to provide for larger and larger numbers of unproductive workers at the expense of smaller and smaller numbers of high-skill workers who can still be plugged in to economically-productive roles? This is an entirely different economic, political, and ethical problematic. In this landscape, Land’s killer AI, speciation, and Galt’s Gulch-style ‘exit’ all begin to look like provisional speculative (if malevolent) answers to the question of: what do you do with all these (economically) useless people?​

"Everything old is new again" - the Italian Fascists were the proto alt-right: http://www.theartstory.org/movement-futurism.htm
 

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At least our Black Shirted comrades were hopeful - the alt-right are full on technology worshipping Nihilists
Yeah, good summation of Land's overall view.

If you're going to have to live in a fascist dystopia, they might as well be as well dressed as the Italians were. Being marched to death by a Silicon Valley hoodie-wearing tween's set of toy robots sounds much worse.
 

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Yeah, good summation of Land's overall view.

If you're going to have to live in a fascist dystopia, they might as well be as well dressed as the Italians were. Being marched to death by a Silicon Valley hoodie-wearing tween's set of toy robots sounds much worse.

I always thought it was weird that the Italians ,who lived in the mother of classicism, embraced a modernist aesthetic whereas the Nazis embraced Speers Gigantic Neo-Classicist Aesthetic - the only modern thing Hitler allowed in all of Germany were the Bauhaus designed servos in the Autobahns
 

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always been an interesting topic of mine. for educated folk it should be alright as they will find many serviced based jobs that a machine may not necessarily take over. But the lower socio groups of workers are seemingly doomed in the coming years as machines can essentially do all of their jobs at a fraction of the rate it costs for employment of a worker. what does society do with these individuals
 

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I always thought it was weird that the Italians ,who lived in the mother of classicism, embraced a modernist aesthetic whereas the Nazis embraced Speers Gigantic Neo-Classicist Aesthetic - the only modern thing Hitler allowed in all of Germany were the Bauhaus designed servos in the Autobahns
Eco goes into the confusing contradictions of Italian fascism in his Ur-Fascism essay.

Take Futurism. One might think it would have been considered an instance of entartete Kunst, along with Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. But the early Italian Futurists were nationalist; they favored Italian participation in the First World War for aesthetic reasons; they celebrated speed, violence, and risk, all of which somehow seemed to connect with the fascist cult of youth. While fascism identified itself with the Roman Empire and rediscovered rural traditions, Marinetti (who proclaimed that a car was more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace, and wanted to kill even the moonlight) was nevertheless appointed as a member of the Italian Academy, which treated moonlight with great respect.​

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/
 

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More time for hobbies!
How do people put food on the table with hobbies?

The US working class is at the leading edge of accelerated capitalism, and it has only lead to drug dependency and suicide.
 
Democracy itself is an interesting topic - how much democracy do we actually have?
FIrst you have to define democracy, I suppose.

From continual online plebiscite voting on everything down to the scheduling of rubbish pick up up to... voting in a monarch once a decade?
 
How do people put food on the table with hobbies?

The US working class is at the leading edge of accelerated capitalism, and it has only lead to drug dependency and suicide.
They have little to no support in the transition from the industrial revolution work model. Because wealth has accumulated disproportionately to the Microsofts, Apples and Googles of the world who turn their billions into non-profit foundations to avoid tax and shape society the way they want it shaped.

And they've done this in large part off the back of re-packaging publicly-funded technological breakthroughs.

Tax the s**t out of these guys. Break up their mega-charity tax-dodges. Put it back into research and services for the people.

Education, health, research, public safety.
 
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FIrst you have to define democracy, I suppose.

From continual online plebiscite voting on everything down to the scheduling of rubbish pick up up to... voting in a monarch once a decade?

A 'govt of the people, by the people, for the people', has always worked for me; As a hard & fast definition.

The rule of Law & equality before the Law are certainly key planks to a universally anonymous checks & balances system, of what constitutes democratic practice.
 
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