#CruelOptimism #PeacefulSabotage
You lack a positive message, they say, by only wanting to slow things down.
But my positive message is to not destroy our civilization. To evolve it constructively. And sustainably.
There is no more positive message than that.
To go where no-one has gone before, okay ... but to not be reckless and tread carefully along the way.
/1
The rate of change is crucial for maintaining organization.
Any complexity scientist or evolutionary biologist knows: you can't adapt if you move too fast.
Fuck around and find out: you need to savor the consequences of every one of your interventions before you perform the next disruption.
Otherwise ... everything eventually goes to shit.
It's not exactly rocket science.
/2
Accelerationism is fundamentally *not* adaptive.
Naive engineering thinking in an evolutionary world.
We're going way too fast already.
A singularity is coming, alright. A voracious vortex of volatility.
It'll flush us down the drain.
/3
Each step of the way, our interventions create unintended consequences.
That's the only truly general law of complexity, and the first (and, perhaps only) one you need to learn.
Yet nobody wants to hear it. It stifles our creativity, they say, and innovation is what we need right now.
To science the hell out of this.
/4
#Hypermodernism is the myth that we can use technology to solve the kind of problems we have created with technology in the first place.
#Metamodernism is the path where we realize we need to change our attitude, before we can use technology in a sustainable way.
And, no, they are not compatible.
/5
First thing to navigate the precipice: slow down. #AntiAccelerationism.
In a sane world, we could try individual responsibility. But this isn't a sane world. Nobody with skin in the game anymore.
In a functioning world, we would regulate against negative effects of new technology. But our democracies no longer function. If they've ever.
In this world, all we seem to manage is resistance and peaceful sabotage. Put as many spanners in the works as we can.
Not ideal but feasible at least.
/6
Now: this is really *not* being negative.
It is our only way to prevent catastrophic collapse.
Of societies. Of infrastructure. Of ecologies. Of the climate.
We need to sabotage the hell out of this system to accelerate the one thing that needs accelerating: the end of this crazy period of history. The end of this cult of productivity. The end of limitless extraction. The end of insanity. The end of this race to the bottom.
/7
By now, it is becoming increasingly clear:
The sooner the crash comes, the more survivable it will be.
Bend, not break? I think it's too late.
But things can break in more or less repairable ways.
This is *not* a time for despair.
/8
To be positive about the future in this age is to resist, to interfere, to drop out, to refuse.
Because our default path accelerates us — not towards a glorious future, not towards fully automated space communism — but towards a pretty big fucking cliff.
Bigger than anything humans have ever dropped over.
Let's stop this senseless game of chicken and take the foot of the pedal.
Resistance is never futile.
The future has never been more open than now. It is ours to change.
/END
Accelerationism is also false argument as is gradualism.
If the constraint demanded is living within planetary boundaries, a community that sustains itself locally fulfills the criteria.
Reliance or national / global supply chains do not.
Local change is by definition incremental but in an entirely different way.
Here comes my obligatory plug for Latour's We Have Never Been Modern as a way to get out of the modernity cognitive trap.
You have to understand that modernism was never achieved, that non-modern structures and assemblages persist even in "hypermodernized" places, and that the whole construct is shot through with colonialism, racism, and other ills. Not only that, the "moderns" have never been doing modernism like they say. Popper's version of the scientific method is not and has never been a good description of how science is done. Technology has never been moved forward by "great men" alone. The best technologies don't inherently triumph, and the correct scientific theories don't automatically rise to preemption.
Once you break that open, so much more becomes visible and possible.
@yoginho Was reminded of your post when I read this:
"The White House says the Navy hasn’t yet escorted oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, after Energy Secretary Chris Wright said so in a tweet that was subsequently deleted. Following the tweet, oil prices briefly dropped by nearly 20 percent, only to rise again after the correction.”
Connection is unclear… but something around how systems built around “you snooze, you lose” can spin out of control.
New decisions from Trump, and new fallout. An overview of day 415. The White House says the Navy hasn’t yet escorted oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, after Energy Secretary Chris Wright said so in a tweet that was subsequently deleted. Following the tweet, oil prices briefly dropped by nearly 20 percent, only to […]
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