#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
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.
Yogi Jaeger
Michael Bacon