understanding has gathered that the market economy capitalism is a discovery process it's inherently epistemological it's not just the object of philosophical attention it's it has its own inherent philosophical activity I think capitalism and artificial intelligence are the same thing it's the same process cap ISM can only be artificial intelligence production and artificial intelligence can only come out of self-propelling capitalism you're not understanding either if you don't see that they're ultimately identical follow the light the light is your guide [Music] so accelerationism starts here well actually let's not get ahead of ourselves little bit more context little bit more context oh okay whoa too much context let's let's move things forward just a little okay here stop perfect this should work so Marx is really the foundational Proto accelerationist although obviously Marx is anti- capitalist he was a staunch utilitarian when it comes to practice and if there's any doubt just read his spee on the question of free trade where he wrote In general the protective system of our day is conservative while the free trade system is destructive it breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonisms of the proletariat and the Bourgeois to the extreme point in a word the free trade system hastens the social Revolution it is in this revolutionary sense alone gentlemen that I vote in favor of free trade so in contrast to what many people may believe Marx was not against using capitalism in every aspect he recognized a very revolutionary potential in exploiting the contradictions in capitalism for Marx capitalism can be used so long as it's used as a weapon against capitalism itself we can also find threads of this self-destructive aspect of capitalism in The Communist Manifesto as well Marx says the Bourgeois historically has played a most revolutionary part the Bourgeois wherever it has gone in the upper hand has put an end to all feudal patriarchal idilic relations it has pitilessly torn asend the mly feudal Ties That bound man to his natural superiors and has left remaining no other Nexus between man and man than naked self-interest than callous cash payment in simpler words the contradictions which will bring the revolution to Bear exist within capitalism itself capitalism's essential aspects as a mode of production as Mark put it bring to the surface a contradiction imminent in capitalist production it isn't hard to see the accelerationist logic built into this idea if capitalism contains within it the contradictions which bring capitalism down then slowing capitalism down doesn't hurt it so much as it actually prevents capitalism from hurting itself a Marxist accelerationist might suggest that we should speed up capitalist processes in order to hasten their collapse instead of trying to focus on protectionism both economic and humanist which would only extend the capitalist process over a longer period of time thus resulting in a greater net negative then we get these guys Delo and guari write the capitalism and schizophrenia series taking Marxist materialism and surgically replacing dialectics with psychoanalysis this Frankenstein's monster of theory becomes influential in many disperate subjects such as an Psychiatry art literature and eventually this guy but wait we'll get there the key to Del losing guari in relation to accelerationism is the idea of deterritorialization deterritorialization is an extended concept of that destructive element that marks identified in free trade the basic idea behind this and this is where stuff gets really weird so hold on the basic idea is that flows of Desire are set free by the introduction of things like money and free trade leading to social destabilization on a far greater scale than Marx actually predicted this destabilization isn't simply a contradiction within capitalism rather it is some sort of force an outside force which has functioned to destabilize societies long before capitalism was around capitalism is simply the historical stage which thus far releases the most flows of desire and therefore produces the most Force the most social destabilization this force is what deling guari termed deterritorialization from anti otopus decoded desires and desires for decoding have always existed history is full of them capitalism and its break are defined not solely by decoded flows but by the generalized decoding of flows the new massive deterritorialization the conjunction of deterritorialized flows so capitalism isn't unique simply because it has the most decoded flows it is as if Society in a very real sense has become a decoding machine society's decoding machine produces a feedback loop of schizophreni tization a movement which opens the potential for an attempt at overcoming the barrier of capital itself not simply to the contradiction and negation of capitalism but instead to pass over the body without organs into a place of radically creative production hopefully in the sake of bringing us towards what they called the new Earth okay now you may have noticed that none of that made any sense don't worry that's a normal feeling we need to put ourselves through this it's important let's try one more time remember Marx he had this whole idea of historical progression don't worry about this whole thing though because delus and guari come up with a whole new set of stages all right I know this looks like a lot but really you can ignore most of it for now all we really need to focus on is that there are stages of history there following a line drawn by the process of deterritorialization in between the stage of capital and the body without organs we see the schizophrenic as a clinical entity uh these would be like casualties produced by failed attempts at overcoming the barrier of capital it's important then to note that schizophrenia in a clinical sense and schizophreni tization what delus and guar you're trying to talk about they're not actually the same thing don't make the mistake of reading this as a vulgar glorification of schizophrenia it's actually really not another question a lot of people have quite understandably what the hell is a body without organs well it's an egg but it's also the remains of a totally deterritorialized socius a place to act and record yourself upon uh Delo uses the term sarbat sir which means literally to fall or fold back upon and upon this totally deterritorialized socius is the the potential for those decoded flows of desire to move in these radically new and creative unprecedented ways there is a real potential in this production of deterritorialized flows of Desire of the schizophreni of capitalism a potential to actually as delus and guari put it overcome a limit shatter a wall the capitalist barrier hopefully the logic here is pretty clear the deterritorialization of capitalism isn't something which simply needs to be dealt with it's something which needs to be worked through in order to take full advantage of that schizophreni ization of capitalism for our potential escape from the body of capital into the vague optimistic concept of a new Earth One Last passage from anti otopus to tie it all up in a nice little bow it should therefore be said that one can never go far enough in the direction of deterritorialization you haven't seen anything yet an irreversible process to a point where the Earth becomes so artificial that the movement of deterritorialization creates of necessity and by itself A New Earth okay now this is starting to sound like real accelerationism hopefully now we have a decent amount of context to get started on the man himself Nick land was a professor of philosophy at War University in the 9s when a certain research group The ccru began ulating around the work of sad plant eventually plant steps down and nickl takes the Reigns the drugs in the jungle music really start to infect the assemblage soon enough we get all sorts of weird experiments like Collective identities qu topology snake becoming and many more work would vehemently deny any association with the ccru and actively deny its existence a common motto became the ccru has not does not and will never exist it is during this wild descent into drugs music and French philosophy that Nick Lan makes his major intellectual turn accelerationism fore fore spee fore spee [Laughter] [Applause] c c fore fore spee [Applause] [Applause] skip it [Applause] accelerationism is not the easiest thing to Define recently Lan tweeted that accelerationism means whatever the process makes it mean well well that's not a very satisfying answer is it in light of this let's Instead try and figure out what the process has made it mean thus far well if we go back to ccru AA land where accelerationism was created there isn't all that much as far as definitions really go Fang Numa rarely mentions the word acceleration instead focusing on broader Notions of cybernetics and the production of non-human intelligences a quick search of the book shows only one instance of the word acceleration actually written by Nick Clan himself oh boy all right let's get into it so let's jump a little bit F farther forward see if we can figure out why we don't see the word acceleration a whole lot this is a passage from Nick Lan's a quick and dirty introduction to accelerationism which is something I hope you've read before you made it here but if not go read it and for those of you who aren't going to read it here's an excerpt for accelerationism the crucial lesson was this a negative feedback ser circuit such as a steam engine governor or thermostat functions to keep some state of a system in the same place its product in the language formulated by French philosophical cyberneticists Jil Delo and Felix guari is territorialization to capture the contrary Trend characterized by self-reinforcing aeny flight or Escape dng coin the inelegant but influential term deterritorialization derer territorialization is the only thing accelerationism has ever really talked about and this is what we'll use as our skeleton key to explore Fang numina ah searching deterritorialization returns more than a dozen written instances by land hopefully you can see why I put you through all that to lose okay so let's use this skeleton key to start translating so we have feedback circuits which come in two forms positive and negative these are the basic schematics borrowed from a field called cyber gentics which land maps cleanly onto Delian der territorialization territorialization reterritorialization and further onto accelerationism so when you hear the words that people meme all the time cybernetics deterritorialization this is what they were referring to this sort of basic schema of feedback loops positive feedback loops circuits which excite themselves and negative feedback loops which either hold the circuit's excitement in place stasis or decreases the excitement in the circuit from Nick Lan's machinic desire capitalism is not a totali system defined by the commodity form as a specifiable mode of production determinant negated by proletarian class Consciousness it is always on a move towards a terminal non-space melting the Earth onto the body without organs and generating what is not promised and pre-existing land but a World created in the process of its tendency it's coming undone its deterritorialization capital is not an Essence but a tendency the formula of which is decoding or Market driven imz progressively subordinating social reproduction to techn commmercial replication so land is discounting here the Marxist accounts of capitalism as a fixed mode of production one negated from within but instead of something active something on the move move towards what terminal non-space the body without organs remember in otopus we didn't see Capital as something headed for something sure it was active it decoded it certainly wasn't the fixed Marxist idea of capitalism but if you remember the chart the body of capital was something that was supposed to be left behind it was a stage in the process of deterritorialization one that provided the potential for our Escape human Escape but wait human Escape where is this human in anti otopus anti dopus intentionally or not reads as if it was written for the machines not us so why did they come to that conclusion that the new Earth was something human something for us why did they come to the conclusion that escape was meant for Humanity was it just a given that humans are the protagonist in this Cosmic story so many billions of years are Elder that Humanity was wearing the plot Armor All Along this is the transvaluation the inhuman transvaluation that really makes Nick L work what it is he was the one to set aside that unfounded assumption and truly continue the Marxist critique no matter where it leads Escape yes absolutely look at the system look at the deterritorialization the movement the the positive feedback the schizophrenia the paranoia so let's ask the hard question then if the process isn't meant for for us whose Escape are we headed towards the story goes like this Earth is captured by a techn capital Singularity as Renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization takeoff logistically accelerating technoeconomic interactivity crumbles social or in Autos sophisticating machine runaway as markets learn to manufacture intelligence politics modernizes upgrades paranoia and tries to get a grip the body count climbs through a series of globe Wars emergent planetary commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire the Napoleonic Continental System the second and Third Reich and the Soviet International cranking up World Disorder through compressing phases deregulation and the state arms race each other into cyberspace converging upon terrestrial meltdown Singularity phase out culture accelerates through its DigiTech heated adaptive landscape passing through compression thresholds Norm to an intensive logistic curve 1500 1756 1884 1948 1880 1996 2004 2008 2010 2011 nothing human makes it out of the near future all right now we get to the real real Meme fod here capitalism is a Transcendent AI from somewhere outside of time working itself into actual form through the positive feedback processes of capitalism yes that is Nick Lan's Point capitalism is AI if you consider the production of artificial intelligences and capitalism different things that only means you don't understand either of the Concepts well enough so that's where we are left some sort of retr chronic hyper intelligent AI has infiltrated or infected mankind somewhere in Europe around 1500 and only now are we in a reflexive position to realize that this thing that we had for a long time thought of as some inert system which we propagated is now something with such a high degree of autonomy and dictation over our society perhaps perhaps it's best to start asking the question are we even behind the wheel anymore it's a matter of debate just how much of land's writing was Parable how much was metaphorical how much was straight up fiction I personally think with the early stuff it's best to lean towards reading Fang Numa 100% seriously I know that can be really hard to do sometimes but I think it's on us to sort of take up that challenge and actually try best we can to muster an answer to these questions no matter how bizarre they may seem superficially the late Mark fiser put it in no less dramatic terms land was our nche and if n is any sort of model it is pertinent to note that more often than not it was his most provocative and radical statements which echko is the most pressi in today I mean who could imagine the Common Man hearing that God was dead would he not have reacted in the same way that we do when we hear that Earth is captured by a techn capital singularity perhaps Lan might not agree I mean not anymore at least he's come down off the drugs and began to suffer from an Epoch of deep disillusionment as he put it stemming from what he calls the Facebook era before for example in the writings of fang Numa land may not have been a card carrying Marxist or anything but he was certainly on the side of Liberation there was a certain inescapable feeling of potential radical new lines of flight K tactics cyber gorilla Insurgency effective feminine violence this was all considered radically leftist political practice but Lan distanced himself from all of this he cut as many personal ties as he could to what he referred to as his ancient work opting that it belongs in the clawed Embrace of the undead amphetamine God he ran a xenos systems blog for a while including a very worthwhile rundown on kek as an archaic chaos God but it became clear to everyone that Lance thought was swerving quite hard to the right eventually nickland finds mold bug is Neo reaction accelerationism no not really has it become a major source of inspiration and critique for accelerationist theory yes absolutely so preempting the complaints this guy made it in a video essay Two Chief Concepts really to take away from this guy they'll help us continue first we have the idea of the cathedral this is probably best understood as the ruling sociopolitical ideological apparatus moldbug put it as the party of the educational organs at whose head is the press and the universities this is our 20th century version of the established church mold bug also explicitly Associates all of this with leftist politics leading to a new reactionary position or neoreactionary position which nickland characterizes with flight from the ruling political ideological apparatus which means in essence a flight from democracy itself as Lan says for the hardcore Neo reactionaries democracy is not merely doomed it is Doom itself fleeing it approaches an ultimate imperative political Alternatives often offered to the cathedral are things like neoc cameralism which is a return to some form of Market based nobility or second we have Patchwork which mold bug describes as a replacement of crappy governments with a global spiderweb of tens even hundreds of thousands of sovereign independent mini countries each governed by its own joint stock Corporation and without regard to its residents opinions rather than have your right to have your say in government or electing government officials you instead have the right to choose between a theoretical smorgus Board of political organizations and you can move to any of them rather than vote you leave does this sound incredibly idealistic probably anyways I'm not all that interested in you know reactionary Theory I'm interested in accelerationism so that's all you're going to get here go watch the distribut US for more if this sounds like your kind of thing his rundown on mold bug is much better than anything I could give you so Nick Lan runs into this idea of neore reactionary Theory and he runs hard with it he goes full reactionary old wig starts in with some strangely pessimistic dis genic IQ Shredder stuff and finally took up his new philosophical mantle the Twitter [ __ ] post now Nick doesn't blog like he used to but aside from his Twitter feed he has begun publishing chapter of his book on bitcoin and one of his other blogs Urban Futures overall his shift has been away from the overtly occult angle towards a more Universal idea of intelligence production something he feels it should be Mankind's duty to Foster basically he's disappointed Humanity hasn't gotten its [ __ ] together in order to bring the damn future into existence it's important to clarify exactly what intelligence means in the concept of accelerationism because as land puts it intelligence explosion is the name for the thing that accelerationism is looking at so for land intelligence is the ability to win games that's about it he thinks that the basic schema of intelligence can be diagrammed through Game Theory the more intelligent a thing the better it operates the better it is at winning games operation and intelligence correlate there's a meme I sometimes see out there that capital is sentient which it's actually a meme L never said that as far as I know sentient is the ability to feel to perceive to experience land doesn't actually think the measure of intelligence artificial or not is determined by feeling that's Consciousness land wants to talk about artificial intelligence not artificial Consciousness this is another challenging conclusion of his anti- anthropocentrism we smuggled in the assumption that in order to be truly intelligent you need to be truly conscious but why do we make that assumption are we assuming intelligence in the universe must feel in the same way that we do and if we take away this assumed subjectivity call it AIC AI or something it's not absurd to see how markets manufacture this sort of intelligence the very nature of capitalism's ability to operate through even the most severe crisis is all the evidence you need remember Game Theory capitalism will always win the game even when we change the rules you know uh the problem is that from the very beginning of capitalism people had this hope you know oh it's approaching its end let's push it a little bit further and I found this quite comical like Marx described capitalism and for Marx capitalism was close to its end approaching disintegration then lenning said okay now imperialism the last stage then half a century later maon says this uh post World War II imperialism it's imperialism capitalism in its highest last rotting State and so on then with postmodernism this new cultural you like for over one century this story goes on we think capitalism is pushed to its limit but it it's like an undead vampire or whatever it returns stronger and stronger so in youngland we mostly get a descriptive account of accelerationism most of the practice comes in the form of critique not positive political formations in Old Land however we have a tendency towards seeing accelerationism as needing our help in some way as if accelerationism needs a bootstrapping of right-wing political practice in order to help it achieve its goals this is what we will call in the rundown RAC or right accelerationism this is a form of accelerationist practice that wants to see Capital take over but only in a particular way it could perhaps called protective accelerationism as it wishes to act as a bullwark in order to protect Capital against its potential enemies and see it flourish so to speak land's analysis of IQ shredders for instance is an example of this it is as if Capital must be making a mistake or it has been bested or duped by Humanity either way we must step in to help it the all powerful AI from the future is coming but only if us meatbags can happen to find the right immigration policy I guess I don't really sympathize with this because capital is supposed to be Pinal you know it's supposed to be outside of human phenomena it's supposed to be the damn elder god not me this is from Pete wolfdale's blog deont Logistics from an article titled so accelerationism what's all that about right accelerationism has converged with neoreaction precisely because it identifies the det territorializing force with capitalism itself it sees itself as biting the bullet and claiming that if we want to accept the liberating alienation of capitalism we also need to accept an inevitable return to the familiar feudal structures it has fleetingly [Music] displaced congratulations to anyone still with me you have all made it past the hard part hopefully this has giving you a pretty good idea of what land is about but contrary to what some people might actually think there is more to accelerationism than just Nick land so we must continue the process let's explore a few more branches of Accel aism you've all heard of RAC because I just told you about it but you may have also heard stuff like L uak Zac GAC Etc none of this is settled everyone in the field seems to disagree on everything in accelerationism but this is my little survey of what's gone on so far laac or left accelerationism is the attempt to overcome capitalism through its deterritorialization because the process of schizophreni ization or whatever you decide to call call it L sometimes calls it the motor of modernity it is something outside of capitalism which we are as yet unaware of left accelerationism agrees with land but is interested in bringing back more of that human Liberation stuff that got left behind with the loose and guari put another way left accelerationism begins from the premise that the deterritorializing force is not capitalism itself but that the transition from feudalism to capitalism was an expression of an emancipatory Drive the capital M's reterritorializing Dynamics has systematically but never wholly suppressed Zak or zero accelerationism is a philosophy of stagnation it sees the proper practice to accelerationism as seeking some sort of political stasis or trying to stop the ferris wheel at the top of the ride Zak is based on the proposition that we're not going to accelerate not the process of deterritorializing capital we're not going to accelerate actual progress overcoming Capital utopian dreams nothing we're going to accelerate absolutely nothing gak is uh wait a minute first xenop feminism is a movement which looks to technology as a radical potential for lines of flight for feminism they draw on the work of people like shalim with Firestone who proposed a certain potential for Liberation in the automation of the birthing process the idea being that you could radically flatten the biological differences between man and woman no longer would women be deemed the bearss of children simply because of biology this echo through sad plant the inaugural head of the ccru when she writes the infinitely influential zeros and ones xenop feminism neatly ties the anti-naturalism of acceleration into radical feminist Theory positioning to link technoscientific Innovation with Collective theoretical and political thinking in which women queers and the gender non-conforming play an unparalleled role gak is gender accelerationism which is some crazy open- Source castration magic it's like xenop feminism's a cult sister or something seeing not a line of flight for gender but rather gender itself as a line of flight for Capital NX the author of the gender accelerationist black paper describes it as the process of accelerating gender to its ultimate conclusions capitalism and its coupling with cybernetics or techn capital wields gender and picks it up where human evolution leaves off the central figure in gak is the transwoman in this castration in this mutation into the asfalis she becomes the body without sex organs the body in a virtual State ready to plug its desire into techn Capital becoming fused with techn capital as a molecular cyborg who is made flesh by the pharmaceutical medical industry uak is unconditional accelerationism this is basically something like accelerationism no matter what where most of the other forms of blank act are defined by their positive political practice uak is defined by the negation of positive political practice uak simply asks for the recognition that the Frameworks for Action are not dictated by us but rather by the process itself as Edmund Burger put it one could go as far to say that uak rejects Praxis even that it is anti-axis yet at the same time this is not so straight forward if we step back and take practice in its most broad sense the higher form of acting in the world then uak is hardly anti- prais it simply asks that the limits and the inevitable dissolution of things be acknowledged there is no contradiction between posing this alongside the xenop feminist Mantra if nature is unjust change nature there are also a few accelerationist adjacent thinkers like Ray brasier a student of land influential in the school of philosophy known as speculative realism probably best known for his work Neil Unbound he is critical of philosophy's tendency towards meaning a staving off of the perceived threat of nihilism around us instead brasier is interested in something like accelerating nihilism to its ultimate conclusions Mark fiser was another student of land deeply influential in the laac movement although always in an insightfully critical fashion he explored the idea of canceled Futures a certain stagnation of cultural capital which at one point was accelerating at a feverish pace and has now seemed to fall strictly into the repetition of nostalgia and parody he does all this through his reimagining of the Daran concept of hology and some other interesting projects He also offers a very valuable critique of land's interpretation of Delo this is from Terminator versus Avatar Land collapses capitalism into what the L and guari call schizophrenia thus losing their most crucial insight into the way that capitalism operates via simultaneous processes of deterritorialization and compensatory reterritorialization capital's human face is not something that can be eventually set aside an optional component or sheath cocoon which with it can ultimately dispense renegar stany is um uh oil is the excrement of the sentient Middle East or Okay so we've got a big map a big map of a big map of intelligence and spirit here actually uh nonconceptual representational mapping the sound NS is mapped onto the automatons to oh n statistically correlated with a patent govern regularity of EI something about Halls uh politics uh corresponds to cr's three-fold symphasis synthesis and reproduction in the imagination and synthesis of recognition in the concept uh and that's my quick rundown on accelerationism if I'm wrong or I missed anything or you have any questions what ever just leave a comment I'll leave you with a short FAQ at the end with some questions some people might have kicking around in their brains at the end of our little project don't accelerationists just want to make everything worse don't they just want to collapse everything so hopefully by this point it's obvious that accelerationism is a very broad subject but none of the ideas we've seen so far have been along the lines of make everything worse yes classic Marxist accelerationist practice involves using what it considered unjust I.E capitalism in order to antagonize social relations but it wasn't in the name of making things worse even Marx's attempts to collapse capitalism were done to make things better at least in the attempt to and the real answer is that accelerationism doesn't really say anything about what we should do it's more of a descriptive claim first and foremost about what's happening the forces of modernity their circuitry ideas about what to do about these things as we have seen not only are they diverse among the accelerationist community a lot of them are contradictory what is hyperstition tiop Plexi kulp Etc actually mean if Googling doesn't get what you want here I mean it's all out there but the accessibility of some of accelerationist writing can be less than inviting just leave a comment I'll try to get around to doing a video on that specific concept or work or whatever you're having trouble with why does this sound different than all the memes I read well it turns out there are much more people making accelerationist memes and there are reading accelerationist Theory even some of the people who apparently are into accelerationism some of the things I hear them say just baffle me like you've never read nickland to say capitalism is sentient or capital is sentient it's just it's it's not a position that accelerationist theory holds although some of the people online calling themselves accelerationists tend to say it I still don't understand any of this well no one said this would be easy I don't think anyone understands accelerationism in the acute sense so much as it is something like a collective decentralized research program scrambling desperately to Define itself we all get to take part in that scrambling though so that's kind of fun I'll leave a few more introductory materials in the description alongside the bibliography of all the source I reference there should be more than enough reading in there for you to keep yourself busy if you're still interested in this stuff that's for sure well anyone who made it to the end here thank you very much for joining me on this journey down the accelerationist rabbit hole if anyone has any questions feel free to leave them down below I'll get back to you as soon as I can thanks again and I hope you all have a speedy day