#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