I’m sure this whole article comes as a shock to nobody, but it’s nice to see it recognised like this.
It’s enough to make you begin to wonder if accelerationism is a viable strategy - things don’t seem set to meaningfully improve any time soon…
Spoken like someone who is certain that they won’t be the first to suffer and die.
Accelerationism leads to a bunch of good people dying, when we need all hands on deck to fix this broken mess. Especially the people who have the most experience with making something work from almost nothing, and experience in being part of a community. Accelerationism also only keeps around those who are willing to exploit others to get ahead. And then humanity starts the next dark age with neo-feudal warlords and the people who survived as their pawns.
Humans don’t even have collectively long enough memory to not repeat the evils of the Holocaust within living memory of its victims, let alone maintain any theoretical level of post-collapse enlightenment. Good thing I’ll be one of the first to die!
Accelerationist don’t have the monopoly on good people dying. Good people are dying now. The question is this; given our current back side of all aspects of life, is the current path more or less harmful than radical change? Do you see the current system as capable of the necessary systemic change needed to prevent the furtherance of harm in the future, let alone the current rate of attrition? If not then what else could be proposed? I would prefer to be able to vote solutions into existence.
Good people are indeed dying now, which begs the question of why we would double down on it with accelerationism in the hope that the remaining humans have a change of heart somewhere along the way. That’s the stuff of movie plot lines, not reality.
Some form of radical change is necessary, definitely. But doing more of the current system isn’t going to lead to better outcomes. It leads to the same outcome, just faster.
What else do we have? There have been multiple revolutions and regime changes in human history of varying success and violence. We could learn from some of those what makes a revolution more helpful or harmful and attempt to replicate that. It’s worth a shot before we just accept the sacrifice of society’s most vulnerable in the hopes it somehow increases empathy among those who were always fine with those people suffering.
Revolution is what i see in the future as well. Accelerationists’s goal seems to be to put pressure on the situation. This pressure would force unrest that either results in large systemic change wile the population has at least a little sway left over the government, or failing that, a Revolution. The whole point is to attempt to boil the frog too fast and to get it to jump out of the pot.
The main fear is that with our current rate of decline, the push to Revolution would take so long that by the time people realize what is happening, they will have no say in the political process, and Revolution is that much harder.
But either way it seems there is no escape from the harm to the world’s most vulnerable, i just want to minimize it as much as possible. And i don’t trust the process to enact needed change.
Though i still vote democrat because this thought saddens me and i still have a little hope left.
