Non-Weekly Cucumber Salad #8
a) The last two weeks: updates
b) Sweet man-made horrors beyond my comprehension: Accelerationism – Part I
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a) The last two weeks: updates
Comrade Kawaiipunk visited for a few days. We had lots of fun, ate great food and swam on the lake. I had never swam on the lake before (even though I live 5 mins away from it) and It was a really energising and positive experience.
I’ve received the shipment of 5 very interesting books I purchased from the Valiz publisher website. Exciting readings ahead! I’ve already started reading Stuck on the Platform.
Dream come true: I found this Evangelion tamagotchi at an anime con that was happening a nearby village. My angel grew up to be an Israfel.
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b) Sweet man-made horrors beyond my comprehension: Accelerationism – Part I
Disclaimer: I have a very deep interest in technology and I could actually talk about technology forever, but for the purpose of this essay I’m going to limit its definition to “recent digital and/or electronic developments and implementations done by big corporations and venture capitalist investors”.
Last week I was invited to prepare a class about Ethics by Design. The course is mostly centered on the mechanics of centralised platforms and the impact of their insidious logic on the user’s mental health.
I thought it would be an interesting opportunity to use this newsletter to publish some essays that could later be used as reading material for the class. It could also serve as a motivation to write a little essay on Accelerationism that I have been planing on writing for a while now.
Introduction: Zizek and depression brought me here
If you follow me on any social media platform (and I’m deeply sorry if that’s the case), there are big chances that you might have seen me ranting about Accelerationism at some point. I don’t expect most people I interact with on the internet to know exactly what I’m talking about when I complain about Accelerationism, so I think it would be very useful to write something introductory about how I got in touch with this subject and what are my views on it.
I don’t plan on elaborating a lot on the definition of Accelerationism because there are already hundreds of articles with this purpose that probably do a better job than I ever could. Instead I’m going to explain how I got to know this subject, how my views on it changed over the years and how I perceive it’s ideological presence in my daily life.
I don’t know exactly how I first got in touch with the concept of Accelerationism, but I imagine it must have been from some Slavoj Zizek video. I used to interact with Zizek’s ideas ironically for a while, but (because of the fragile nature of the human mind) I actually took into consideration some of his thoughts, specially during my nihilistic depressive phase.
I was introduced to Accelerationism as an ideology that had the goal of overcoming capitalism by implementing politics that exacerbated its intrinsic contradictions. It’s important to take into consideration that when I first got in touch with these ideas I was extremely depressed and nihilistic. That being said, it just made lots of sense to me to develop policies and practices in order to capitalism self-destruct.
I remember being very tired (and I still am to this day) of seeing revolutionary and progressive movements being coopted by capitalism and reduced to marketing strategies. When I first started reading about Accelerationism I was very intrigued by how deeply chaotic and destructive were the ideas of that ideology. It seemed to accept and consider the terrible consequences of what it would actually take to overcome capitalism. Accelerationism really resonated with the deeply hopeless and negative perception of reality that I had when I was introduced to it. Chaos and destruction were not only inevitable, but they were the way towards a new world.
It’s important to say that back then it seemed to me that Accelerationism was an idea that was very “out there” and wouldn’t actually gain any conscious traction, but rather be achieved by the fact that society would inevitably march towards a capitalism overload.
The Trashcan of Ideology
When I started to “get into” Accelerationism I was working at a technology research institute and I was very focused on mindlessly following “tech” trends like blockchain and facial recognition. I actually remember being very excited about blockchain and talking about the possibilities of public infrastructure implementations and being called a “blockchain utopian” by coworkers.
What I now understand is that I was facing “technological development” as a certain and righteous future, and that’s what most of us actually do. Last week I was watching this Disney (🤮) movie called “Tomorrowland” (George Clooney só fez esse filme por causa de dívida de jogo) and it made me think a lot about how we’re ideologically brainwashed since childhood to have a very limited perception of what technological development is, what progress is, and what the future should look like.
In Tomorrowland, the renderisation of a perfectly developed future was a vertically dense city, with glass buildings, harnessed nature, and extravagant digital and electronic tools.
The thing about being blindly desperate to overcome the unsatisfying present is that it leaves little room in our heads to actually idealise what would come next, and companies like Disney prey on the little time we have to develop any kind of genuine creativity to limit and manipulate our perceptions and ideas, but that’s actually a topic for a different essay.
What I want to say is that Tomorrowland is only one of the hundreds of films that makes us understand, accept and work on developing the ideal future as a heavily artificial and overwhelmingly digitally-dependent environment.
So back in 2019, there I was, eating directly from the trashcan of the “technological development” ideology. A piece of pop culture that really resonated with me back then was (and still does because it is one of the most important pieces of pop culture ever done in the history of humanity) Ghost in the Shell. I was very interested in transhumanism. I remember being a little bit obsessed about the “limitations of being human” and would a new being be able to overcome them.
I need to say that (thankfully) I never actually got into reading any of Yuval Harari’s books, even though my interests were very aligned with his philosophy back then, because I have a very strong prejudice against best sellers. Looking back. I’m very happy I never got into his writings because that would just have been a huge waste of my time.
As it turns out to be true, sometimes you just need someone to offer you a little bit of a change of perspective, and that’s what happened when I got in touch with Chinese philosopher Yuk Hui to prepare some artworks for a talk he was going to give in Rio.
“They Live” glasses emoji: when?
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully express how important it was for me to get in touch with Yuk Hui’s writings. And it kind of happened by accident.
I would usually get a very short and objective briefing about the artworks I needed to develop at the institute, but the person who usually worked on the briefings didn’t have enough time to wrap her head around the subject, so she suggested I did some research on the topic and took my own conclusions.
I remember the first article I read on him was an interview for E-flux, and I was immediately interested by what he had to say.:
“Our computers, smartphones, and domestic robots are no longer mechanical but are rather becoming organic. I propose this as a new condition of philosophizing. Philosophy has to painfully break away from the self-contentment of organicity, and open up new realms of thinking.
The first impression I had was that this person was trying to formally formulate the philosophy of Ghost int he Shell, from with a different perspective than the one I had. Yuk Hui introduced me to a new understanding of the concept of technology, along with deep criticisms to modern western philosophy.”
[…]
“This is also why evolution is creative, since it is fundamentally organological in the sense that evolution is also a process in which human beings are obliged to constantly create new organs (e.g., figures), while not being blinded by them, i.e., by not regarding them as the totality of reality. Mechanism wants to explain life, without realizing that it is only a phase of life, e.g., a figure”
[…]
“To ask a concrete question: Is someone who has an artificial arm and an artificial eye no longer human, since within this person the organic and the mechanistic are no longer opposed? Or from another perspective, is transhumanism, with its belief that the entire body can be replaced and enhanced, actually built upon a linear way of thinking, one that expresses an extreme humanism? On the surface, transhumanism seems to want to get rid of the concept of the human. However, this gesture is only camouflage. Transhumanism is a quintessentially humanist approach to the world, since all is captured within a metaphysical gaze.”
I remember being struck by the impression that this person was somewhat articulating a “formal philosophy of Ghost in the Shell”, but from a very interesting and compelling perspective. I talked to him a few weeks after reading this interview about this impression, and he told me that Ghost in the Shell is his actually favourite film. That made me even more interested in further researching his writings.
I remember the importance given to The Enlightenment when I was in school. I was taught that those philosophers built the pathway to the ultimate, most reasonable and correct way of understanding the world, and until I read Yuk Hui’s writings I had never questioned that. I also had never got in touch with how those ideals were insidious and omnipresent in contemporary western society (who would have thought that everything is, indeed, ideology?)
Yuk Hui’s writings introduced me to many interesting and important ideas and concepts, but the one that really changed my whole perspective towards Accelerationism was presented during his talk on Technological Singularity at UFRJ.
I had previously heard about Technological Singularity back in 2016 but I dismissed it as some Silicon Valley fever dream bullshit and never gave it much thought.
After Yuk Hui’s talk I understood that Accelerationism is actually the umbrella under which Technological Singularity exists. Technological Singularity is one of the main goals of Accelerationism.
Later, I also learned that Accelerationism isn’t only controversial because of it’s radically dangerous ideas, but because those ideas can be adopted by both “radical leftists” (contemporary Marxists who are completely lost in life and need to go out and touch some grass) and right wing extremists (In retrospect, the Helter Skelter can the considered an Accelerationist context of extreme racial tension, for example).
But most importantly, I understood that what I had dismissed as an “out there” philosophy and a “Silicon Valley fever dream” were actually ideas being heavily invested in and implemented by oligarchs in contemporary society.
Let’s take a break.
I feel like in order to go forwards with this essay it’s important to give the readers some time to catch up with the concept of Technological Singularity. I really wouldn’t dare write about any definitions and developments of these ideas because, as I said, that has been exhaustively done in better ways than I could.
If you don’t have any time in your hands, I recommend reading the Wikipedia page on Technological Singularity, it is important to note that:
That is an apocalyptic context concept;
Philosophers like Yuval Harari are subscribers to the inevitability of the Technological Singularity and that is one of the reasons why you see me complaining about him on social media sometimes and dismissing his writings. I believe his comprehension of humanity and society come straight from the trashcan of ideology. I have beef with that man.
In two weeks I will publish the second part of this essay, and I hope that most readers will have had the opportunity to catch up with the main concepts I have discussed by then. If you have some free time I would also recommend reading something introductory about Anarcho-capitalism, because it will be mentioned on the next part.
With Love, ✽ ⭐︎ ✦ ✧
Ana Luisa