Accelerate
May 10, 2020
Here I want to gather a few thoughts on accelerationism, a current of thinking with near roots in the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (a sort of experimental theory collective based at Warwick University in the 1990’s), and far roots in Marx’s idea that capitalism would ultimately create the conditions of its own disintegration. The term only really came to signify anything like a “current” sometime in 2010’s, and since then it has fragmented into left-wing and right-wing variants (called l/acc and r/acc, though sometimes begrudgingly), not to mention a whole slew of other offshoots. This Guardian article provides a nice account of accelerationism’s history and some of its protagonists.
There are several things I find interesting about accelerationism, not least that the very fact that it has been able to fragment into multiple antagonistic strains without abandoning the word testifies to its status as a legit intellectual subculture, living an amorphous and often turbulent existence outside academia. Another is that its mode of thinking provides a wide-angle means of understanding the relationship between capitalism and the political categories of the left and right, a relationship which has often felt blurred along weird lines in the years since the financial crash of 2008. This is what I want to focus on here.
At the heart of all this is the question of whether capitalism itself is a progressive or reactionary force, an agent of social change or an agent of stasis. The jump-off point is Deleuze & Guattari, who famously analysed capitalism in terms of the cybernetic concepts of positive and negative feedback. Negative feedback refers to mechanisms of homeostatic self-regulation, while positive feedback is a destabilising force that opens up lines of flight from equilibrium states. A thermostat implements a negative feedback system, monitoring for deviations from a desired state and then adjusting material flows to maintain it. The audio feedback produced when a microphone is held close a speaker is an example of positive feedback, a runaway process of growing intensity which shakes apart an equilibrium.
Nick Land, a key figure associated with the CCRU in the 90’s and these days with r/acc, regards capitalist modernity as dominated by positive rather than negative feedback processes (see this interview, also his quick intro to accelerationism). On Land’s view capital itself is the motor of creative change in society, the meme that locks productive energies onto a positive feedback loop. From this perspective the left looks like a reactionary force, one whose goal is to resist the rapid reconfiguration of human forms of life brought about by capitalist modes of production.
Land’s l/acc critics (see Pete Wolfendale’s post and Alex William’s critique of Land in e-flux) have argued that this picture is based on a selective reading of Deleuze & Guattari, emphasising that capitalism induces not only the breaking apart of old structures through positive feedback (what D&G called deterritorialisation), but also their re-institution in more diffuse structures regulated by negative feedback (reterritorialisation). For example, while capitalism did break apart the explicit feudal class structure it also reintroduced class division in more dynamic and implicit forms, crystallising in the modern day wealth inequalities hidden behind the opaque mechanisms of high finance. While capitalism did have a hand in creating the conditions for the breakdown of European colonialism, it then brought about a new, in some ways more insidious neocolonial status quo by re-instituting similar power structures in the distribution of labour across supply chains, the outsourcing of moral responsibility, and so on.
From the l/acc perspective capital is not itself the source of creative energies. These energies lie rather in human collectivity, and capital’s relation to them is parasitic rather than generative. According to this thinking the progressive force suppressed by the violence of the feudal order was first released, then appropriated by capital in the creation of new stable structures whose function is to reproduce the productive apparatus itself (i.e. for capital growth). Deleuze & Guatarri’s picture of capitalism is one of a perpetual process of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, in which social forms are never really changing but always appear to be, each new iteration presenting itself as a liberation from its predecessor. For the l/acc capitalism yields not progress but frenzied stasis. It is an inherently reactionary force masking itself with an illusion of rapid change. (Mark Fisher puts this point in terms of a form/content distinction: capitalism produces rapid change at the level of material content while stifling innovation at the level of social or cultural forms.) The progressive goal of the left is therefore to liberate the creative energies latent in human collectivity from the suppressive circuits of capital accumulation.
A lot of this extrapolates tensions already present in Marx. There’s a point Steven Shaviro made (I can’t remember where exactly) that you don’t really find hatred of capitalism in Marx, but something more like an obsessive fascination with the way it is able to create both wealth and misery simultaneously. Understood in a big-picture kind of way, Marx’s insight was that the capitalist mode of economic organisation cracks apart social relations and redirects the released energy into material production, effectively buying a very specific kind of wealth at the price of social alienation. The catalyst for each tear in social fabric is usually technological innovation, with novel human-technology entanglements sparking the positive feedback loops that break apart existing social structures. From the l/acc perspective what then happens is that rather than these energies being channeled into creating new, more egalitarian social formations they are siphoned off by capital, both suppressing sociogenesis and cooling off the new intensities by integrating them into the negative feedback circuits of capital growth.
If the disintegration of social fabric is an exothermic process then the homeostatis of capital accumulation is endothermic, requiring a constant stream of new energy to sustain its self-reproduction. (And the idea here is really to understand capital itself as a quasi-Darwinian actor, a social structure or meme which bends local human activity to its own interests, in much the same way that the reproductive interests of an organism are dependent on the suppression of evolutionary processes at the cellular level.) This need for new input is what drives the process of deterritorialistion and reterritorialisation, the social field becoming increasingly fractalised by new technological mediations while material production spins at faster and faster velocities.
The internet and its history is one site on which this difference between the l/acc and r/acc is felt keenly. Their disagreement is illustrated in the story Gabriella Coleman tells of the growth of the free and open source software movement (f/oss) in her book Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Coleman, 2013). In many respects copyleft was the greatest subversion of property law in history. The original f/oss movement was able to take enough productive energies out of capital’s reach that the tech giants of the time felt the need to put huge amounts of effort into placing legal obstructions in its way—and failed. What’s striking about Coleman’s account is that it describes in detail the processes by which these energies were then subtly re-captured by capital interests. One example was IBM’s adoption of the Debian open source operating system and their allocation of several developers to work on its codebase full time, both acquiring influence over its future direction and effectively capitalising on the free labour provided by the hundreds of developers working on the project.
Facebook’s decision to open source its front-end framework React indicates the extent to which capital value has shifted away from intellectual property and into the brand. This shift in the form of capital has seen a corresponding shift in the form of labour, as constructed in the contemporary figure of the developer, hacker, or digital nomad, for whom open source contributions will now often function primarily as clout which gets them paid work (or some other kind of career gain). All of this represents the deterritorialistion and reterritorialisation process in action, the form of capital diversifying and decentralising to integrate the previously released energies into its accumulation circuits as it restructures the interests driving f/oss development. These are the kind of forces that leave us in the odd situation where founders and employees of tech giants can self-describe as “hackers”, a term originally designating those who stood in active opposition to the corporatisation of technology.
The Facebookification of the internet provides a vivid illustration of where the faultline between l/acc and r/acc lies. Nick Land reckons it is a temporary blip in the acceleration of digital forms, which is now poised to leap off again with the arrival of the blockchain. The l/acc however will see it as an inevitable consequence of the reactionary pressure of capital, one which must somehow be jettisoned if the velocity of frenzied stasis is ever to give way to the acceleration of emancipatory change.
References
- Coleman, G. (2013). Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. Princeton University Press.