Thread by @dynamic_proxy

So I was thinking about how one might quickly explain what accelerationism was actually about, and the example occurred to me of the famous line of Marx/Engels about the bourgeoisie creating its own gravediggers, and the fact that this can be understood in two different ways -

On the one hand, you can see it as an argument about immiseration: capitalism steadily makes things worse for workers, to the point where revolt and overthrow of the system becomes inevitable.

On the other, you can see it as an argument about structural possibility: proletarianisation gives rise to new kinds of organisation, those who work together in the factory can strike and take ownership of the factory together.

The former reading gives rise to the "vulgar" understanding of accelerationism as about wanting to intensify and speed up immiseration, so as to hasten the moment of revolt and overthrow. But that's not what Marx and Engels were driving at, and not what accelerationism's about.

The latter reading, in which capitalism produces social and technical forms which outstrip the bourgeoisie's powers of surveillance and control, is where accelerationism looks for a foothold - where is this occurring, what opportunities arise as a result?

Now, we're currently in a moment of intense pessimism about technology platforms, cyberculture, "the internet" and so on: all of these things are now commonly pictured as apparatuses of surveillance and control, operated by huge monopoly players: capital has the upper hand.

And that's because we're in a period of sweeping reterritorialisation. The streaming platforms have taken over where peer-to-peer sharing used to be. There has been massive centralisation of social media and group conversation - Facebook groups where once there was Usenet.

Years ago I wrote a post on "the internet as norm" which talked about what people meant when they ascribed a sort of moral agency or tendential drift to "the internet" itself, as in "the internet treats censorship as damage, and routes around it"

I don't think people *do* talk much in that way about "the internet" any more: it has become dumb substructure (which nobody who isn't involved in keeping it working really understands these days) and all the world-shaping agency has moved up the stack

And this highlights one of the pitfalls into which accelerationism tends to fall: it looks for something moving stealthily under the surface of business as usual, some disruptive force with its own tendential impetus, and identifies with it, seeing it as a counter-power.

But this identification with a sort of infra-social power, whether it's the libidinal flows of desire running through popular culture or the new cyborg flesh being imagined into being by emerging music technology, is always a hostage to fortune. Eventually the money men catch up.

Someone, and I'm sorry I've forgotten who, was saying a while back that we haven't finished mourning the utopian promise of the internet, that our present feeling of "stuckness" has a lot to do with the collapse of that project and the imaginary associated with it

(Of course for many people right now the frustration of the Corbyn project is a much more raw and immediate object of unresolved grief - along with the receding prospect of any sort of viable continuation of life as we have known it...)

But the other side of accelerationism is the awareness that there is no final victory for capitalism, because its own internal dynamics constantly push it to introduce new "accelerants" into the socio-technical system.

Some things got shaken loose during the period of "high" internet utopianism; much of today's turmoil around gender, for example, owes a great deal to experiments in community and communal discourse which really exploded during that era.

Twitter, gross monopoly eyeballs-selling platform that it is, is also a "site of contestation" around voice, platform, identity, representation, status, the prerogative of the heckler and so on, in ways that we're still struggling to grasp: an extraordinary organ of consciousness

So while we might regard the techno-utopian exuberance of (sigh) the CCRU as quaint, cringe or (given subsequent developments, or even just a clear-sighted understanding of what was in play at the time) politically dubious, I think a "fidelity to the fidelity" remains possible:

platforms aren't monoliths, there are no *total* systems of control, everything that acts generates turbulence and the more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers