xenogothic

Back in July, I had a really excellent time chatting with Craig, Matt and Will of the Acid Horizon podcast about my book Egress.

Just a few months later and I’m back with Craig, Matt, Will and Adam to talk about Postcapitalist Desire, the collection of Mark Fisher’s final lectures I edited during lockdown.

You can listen to the first 40 minutes of our discussion above and, if you want to hear the rest, check out their Patreon here.

After seeing this Text to Image API thing go around on Twitter and having the result flaw me, I decided to put “xenogothic” into the generator fifty times and gather together a gallery of trout-looking trout fishermen from Innsmouth… Just because… Embrace the full horror after the jump.

Happy nightmares!

Enrico Monacelli has written the first review of Mark Fisher’s Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures for The Quietus. It’s a really lovely piece of writing that is, by turns, a personal reflection on coming into contact with Fisher’s work, the world he created through his writings, and that other world we should still be encouraged to yearned for.

You can read the full review here and find an excerpt below.

At the tail end of [the k-punk] anthology stands a fragment that disquiets the vision of a straightforwardly melancholic Fisher, a remainder of a work yet to come and of the complexities yet to be discussed. The fragment, bearing the sun stricken title Acid Communism, revolved around the constant resurrection, under various guises — be it in 1968 in Paris, in Bologna 1977, or throughout the various baroque sunbursts of the psychedelic counterculture — of the idea of an unbound abundance beyond the drudgery of late stage capitalism, an idea which felt, more than once, not only probable, but even imminent. Nonetheless, this brief piece remained, even within the comprehensive anthology, a kind of pre-Socratic fragment, the unclear trace of a project which could have been but never was, providing, also, an alibi for even more simplified rehashes of Fisher’s unfinished business.

Precisely because of this open wound, these sunken difficulties and this unexhausted potential, the recent publication of Mark Fisher’s Postcapitalist Desire, his final lectures at Goldsmiths College, edited and curated by Matt Colquhoun for Repeater Books, is immensely precious. Fisher’s last lessons are so vital because they feel familiarly alien and complex within Fisher’s own body of work, extending the ever-present rupture within his posterity.

The bleeding heart of this project is the yearning for a better life, the joys and failures such yearning brings. Contrary to the emaciated ravers and McDonalds outlets that dotted the drowned London which we have accustomed ourselves to while digesting the dirges of Capitalist Realism’s lost futures, Postcapitalist Desire is inhabited by the dim, and sometimes fading, aura of the generations of workers, students, and pop superstars who dreamt of an abundance which looks at once hopelessly impossible and painfully near. It stems from a form of fun and desire which have little to do with our present umbilical turn-ons and resentments, one that speaks to us through (quoting Herbert Marcuse), “the spectre of a world which could be free”. Postcapitalist Desire is a brief and experimental reconstruction of the march of our own consciousness towards a more thorough and sincere form of enjoyment.

We went on the most magnificently long walk along the Thames path last night. I think it’s the furthest I’ve been along that route. We walked from Deptford to the Greenwich Ecology Park. It reminded me of walking to Tower Bridge with Robin the other way just before New Year’s.

I reckon if you combined those two walks and went from Tower Bridge to Greenwich Ecology Park, you’d hit 90% of my fav places in this city. I’m gonna miss the Thames a lot.

We had it confirmed today that our new landlord accepted our letting application. Just over a week and we’ll be back in the north. It’s starting to feel very real and I am an emotional mess about all of it. Excuse an excess of cross-platform sentimentality over the next week or so as I crumble.

Cybertrop(h)ic has written a response to my recent post on anti-praxis. After a less than interesting response to it on Twitter, it is nice to see some thought going into a critique from someone self-identifying as “post-libertarian/post-right”. The rest of the Twitter right largely seemed upset at something they’d barely read. I’ll happily take an argument built on good faith than that paranoid rubbish any day.

And so, Cybertrop(h)ic’s time taken to respond deserves a thoughtful response in kind.

Primarily, there are a few assumptions made in Cybertrop(h)ic’s response that I’d like to address in the hope that I can further clarify some things left open to misinterpretation. These misinterpretations are mostly my own fault. The points that Cybertrop(h)ic raises in their post are consistently comments I knew I could have spent a lot more time on but simply brushed passed for brevity.

I left a version of this post in the comments of the original post but you know me — any excuse to collect more blog fodder. Below are quotes followed by my responses.

On the Twitter conversation that followed the previous post, Cybertrop(h)ic writes:

One intriguing divergence is that identified by Cyborg Nomade, when he argues that “antipraxis isn’t “do nothing” – but rather do what you want, i.e., follow desire”. To which Matt retorts that capitalism has monopolised desire, and so simply following one’s own desire within capitalism leads to “boomerism”, presumably of the “I just want to grill, watch Netflix and drink Coca Cola. What are you all so fussed about? Enjoy capitalism!” variety.

Matt sees something questionable in this boomerism, and so do I, although from a somewhat different angle. I’m reminded of a line Nick Land wrote in his piece “Romantic Delusion”, in response to the typical “capitalism turns us into mindless consuming zombies” line of anti-capitalist critique:

“We contemptuously mock the trash that it offers the masses, and then think we have understood something about capitalism, rather than about what capitalism has learnt to think of the apes it arose among”

In this framing, mindless consumerism is not the fault of capitalism but of human nature, or more specifically the nature of the majority of the herd. Overly-elitist and essentialist as this take is, ignoring the ways in which capitalism assists in the construction (and constriction) of consuming subjects, Land does have a point: capitalism will give you what you want, but it isn’t capitalism’s fault if you’re not a connoisseur of fine things.

This is a point I agree with. It may not be explicit in the previous post, or the following Twitter discussion, but this is an accelerationist argument shared by both (early) Land and Fisher that can be found in Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy. And so, unfortunately, the assumption being made that my questioning of desire is based on some sort of middle-class snobbery is mistaken. What I am calling “boomerism” is precisely the lack of imagination that broadly defines the “boomer” meme in my mind — an unimaginative response from the 20th century’s most spoilt generation, who essentially conflate anti-capitalism with anarcho-primitivism, an argument made by anti-Occupy boomers incessantly following the financial crash of the late 2000s.

In this sense, what is meant by capitalism “monopolising” desire is that capitalism encourages our belief in the false equivalence of a desire for fast food and other mod-cons constituting a desire for capitalism overall. (See Louise Mensch’s infamously bad take below.)

This is an example, arguably made famous by Fisher in recent years, of the ways that capitalist realism limits desire to a desire for material goods, and material goods are understood solely as commodities that only capitalism can produce. Before we can even get to a place of discussing an increasingly commonplace desire for a wealth beyond capitalism, the conversation is shutdown as being a hatred of desire itself rather than a desire for other options or simply a better and less oppressive way of life.

Cybertrop(h)ic, of course, writes that they “happen to think that capitalism actually does pretty well at [fulfilling desires]. It could do a lot better, but it is pretty good at it already.” That’s certainly true, at a very basic level of an itch scratched, but I would argue that capitalism isn’t exactly efficient at this. Surely there are other and better ways of fulfilling needs and desires than the currently dull and dysfunctional system that works by breaking down. Here again the concept of “desire” is further complicated.

Fisher tackles this explicitly and at length in his Postcapitalist Desire lectures — indeed, it’s the entire negative inspiration for the course. He quotes Lyotard at length on it in the final lecture, for instance, specifically drawing on the evil Libidinal Economy‘s veiled swings of contempt at the Marxist academics of the 1960s who carried forth a kind of libidinal snobbery that Cybertrop(h)ic is mistakenly assuming I share. As Lyotard writes:

Why, political intellectuals, do you incline towards the proletariat? In commiseration for what? I realize that a proletarian would hate you, you have no hatred because you are bourgeois, privileged smooth-skinned types, but also because you dare not say the only important thing there is to say, that one can enjoy swallowing the shit of capital, its materials, its metal bars, its polystyrene, its books, its sausage pâtés, swallowing tonnes of it till you burst — and because instead of saying this, which is also what happens in the desire of those who work with their hands, arses and heads, ah, you become a leader of men, what a leader of pimps, you lean forward and divulge: ah, but that’s alienation, it isn’t pretty, hang on, we’ll save you from it, we will work to liberate you from this wicked affection for servitude, we will give you dignity. And in this way you situate yourselves on the most despicable side, the moralistic side where you desire that our capitalized’s desire be totally ignored, forbidden, brought to a standstill, you are like priests with sinners, our servile intensities frighten you, you have to tell yourselves: how they must suffer to endure that! And of course we suffer, we the capitalized, but this does not mean that we do not enjoy, nor that what you think you can offer us as a remedy — for what? — does not disgust us, even more. We abhor therapeutics and its Vaseline, we prefer to burst under the quantitative excesses that you judge the most stupid. And don’t wait for our spontaneity to rise up in revolt either.

That the modern Right doesn’t think the Left is wholly aware of this decades-old critique is a mistake. In fact, they ignore the Left’s critiques of it entirely to encourage the persistent existence of a reactionary working-class. Again, Fisher talks about this far more expertly than I could.

If my stab at a contemporary anti-praxis in relation to desire holds anything within its heart, it is Lyotard’s negativity in this regard; his fury. (I am writing something else on this fury’s place within an anti-praxis at the moment because there is plenty more here worthy of unpacking, so more on this another time.)

Matt seems very insistent on hanging onto the signifier “socialism”, for reasons that I’m failing to ascribe to much beyond a general leftist sentimentality. Sure, “socialism” can charitably be interpreted as meaning nothing more than “post-capitalism”, but then why not just say “post-capitalism”? Matt claims that socialism “[has] long been the stepping stone towards something other than this mess”, to which I respond: really? Since when?! I would say that, historically, socialism has served as a stepping stone to either (1) a worse mess, (2) slightly watered down dirigiste capitalism or (2) nothing of note at all.

The point about socialism being the stepping stone out of capitalism, which I admittedly only nod to in passing, is from Marx’s comments on the negation of the negation. (See here.)

Cliff Notes: Capitalism’s negation of feudalism is defined, in part, for Marx, by the opening up of the potential for individual ownership. However, if individual ownership is universalised, then it’s just social ownership. Ergo, in the most basic and reductive of senses: feudalism > capitalism > socialism.

Whilst capitalism speeds forth ever faster towards its own mutation, it is the capitalists themselves who cause drag on and attempt to decelerate the system so that they can hold onto their private rents (and, as is increasingly the case, proliferate rent as a solution to cultural access and therefore negating capitalism’s initial negation of feudalism and the concept of individual property. We increasingly live in a world twisted towards the negation of Marx’s negation of the negation. It is this negative feedback loop of capitalist drag that has led some to call capitalism’s present “frenzied stasis” a kind of “neofeudalism“. I prefer Peter Frase’s term “rentism” personally.)

No other point being made in the previous post other than that — and, even then, only in passing. I explicitly made the point that “we can argue about the finer points of whether socialism (as an ideological institution) is the best successor to capitalism.” Socialism is, in this sense, just shorthand for postcapitalism minus that term’s “capitalocentrism”.

There is an irony here, however, and this seems to be the very same fallacy that underwrote the previous right-wing responses to the previous post. Cybertrop(h)ic’s word-count unfortunately doesn’t mean they sidestep the same mistake.

If the whole post is repeatedly making the case for a kind of de-institutionalised practice, why would I be hanging onto socialism as a signifier? That’s why I am emphasising it as a general concept. It is a right-wing response that demonstrates the very incapability of thinking outside of institutionalised — that is, in this sense, overtly-defined and reified — categories that the post is trying to critique. Granted, our expectations regarding political language makes this difficult — and this is why there’s a further irony in others thinking a lack of familiar talking points reduced the post to word salad — but, again, this is the whole point of drawing on Deleuze’s essay “Instincts and Institutions”, which arguably implicates our use of language more than anything.

I’ll return to the relevance of that essay after the next point made…

No doubt Matt’s attachment to socialism also contributes to his view of anti-praxis (as de-instutionalised practice) in a narrowly political form. He dismisses bureaucratic, institutionalised party politics in favour of decentralised activism and grassroots mass movements. This is a step in a good-ish direction, (I like the idea of anti-praxis as a destratified, decoded mirror image of praxis) but also misses the bigger picture: this anti-praxis doesn’t need to mean politics in the sensu stricto at all.

There are a lot of things one can do that aren’t politics. Anti-praxis could mean art or business or science or sport or…anything. Sure, a lot of these things are less “impactful” than politics, but then how impactful is politics, really?

Same issue here. I don’t see how this can be the conclusion drawn other than from a woeful misreading of the overarching point. That anti-praxis slips out of the vector of pure politics into other spaces is precisely the point being made, albeit less reductively.

Matt’s suggestion (pace Deleuze) that we fall back on our instincts, live those instincts beyond the institutions that constrain and deny them — “follow our instincts and allow our institutions to adapt accordingly” — while pleasingly aligned with libidinal materialism, seems also a tad misguided. I think the major problem is the word “instinct”, which implies not only some kind of authentic desire that lies repressed beneath the surface (very Freudian, too Freudian) but even a quasi-conservative essentialism and anti-intellectualism.

“Instinct” is used in my previous post simply because Deleuze uses it in his essay on “Instincts and Institutions”. I think what is interesting about this usage (or at least in how that essay is translated) is that it shows how “instinct” and “institution” share a peculiar etymological root whilst supposedly being disparate concepts.

To focus on “instinct” as an inappropriate word to use misses the point being made about its conceptual relation to “institution”. Indeed, in critiquing it as “too Freudian”, isn’t Cybertrop(h)ic conflating the two and erasing the critique being made? What is Freud’s “Trieb” — more readily translated as “drive” these days, anyway — if not an institutionalised form of instinct? A Freudian instinct is precisely an instinct understood within the institution of Freudianism… Precisely the kind of poor logical short-curcuiting being discouraged. I didn’t think I’d need to spell it out.

That Deleuze is implicitly questioning this is important, and it is a point that returns in his work with Guattari — that is, the anti-Freudianism of Anti-Oedipus and their praxes of institutional critique and schizoanalysis, which are two ways of navigating our instinctual baggage.

Again, I want to write more on the relevance of schizoanalysis here in a forthcoming post. The relevance of this was not discussed in my previous post but I had hoped it would linger overhead.

Suffice it to say (for now) that my view of the world is not so black and white that I think we can’t hold multiple views (and critiques) of our situation at once — in fact, that was precisely the point of the post: we can and should do this and I think accelerationism implores us to.

We should be familiar with this kind of argument. For instance, take Deleuze and Guattari asking the question “Who does the earth think it is?”, as in “what is the earth for-itself?”, and how are we implicated and shaped by its disinterested processes? They straddle an apparent paradox where nature is seen as this totality we are but a part of and have no control over, and yet they also explore how we have a capacity (in xenofeminist and promethean terms) to change our own nature. That Alex Williams (via Ray Brassier) would carry forth this sort of question, implicitly following this line of enquiry in their respective bodies of work (asking “what is capital for-itself?”), demonstrates the foundational accelerationist move.

For me, whilst it may break with what Vincent Garton had in mind, I hope this rough and ready unpacking nonetheless resonates much more with Edmund Berger’s original essay on the topic, in which he writes that

U/ACC manifests an anti-praxis line when a very specific sort is proposed, that is, the political-territorial subordination and navigation of the forces in motion by a mass subject – the politics of striation. For this reason, perhaps it is best to view U/ACC not as anti-praxis, but as anti-collective means of intervention.

Again, this is not so controversial unless we consider a collective means of intervention to be the be-all-and-end-all of political action. And I don’t see how such a view abjures any alliance to another mode of praxis in another circumstance. If anything, this argument is an attempt to separate the measurements and diagnoses of accelerationism from other forms of political action. (See “You Are Not An Accelerationist”). This point has constantly been missed by Twitter orbiters, defining themselves as “unconditional accelerationists” and thereby making U/Acc a condition for their own mode of acting. It’s a paradox. It is precisely confusing praxis with anti-praxis.

This is why Berger later writes that

To accelerate the process, and to throw oneself into those flows, leaves behind the (already impossible) specter of collective intervention. This grander anti-praxis opens, in turn, the space for examining forms of praxis that break from the baggage of the past. We could count agorism and exit as forms impeccable to furthering the process, and cypherpolitics and related configurations arise on the far end of the development, as the arc bends towards molecularization of economic and social relations. It is in these horizons that conversation and application must unfold.

No more reterritorializing reactions. No more retroprogressivism.

Isn’t this precisely Steven Shaviro’s proto-accelerationist critique that the whole of the last post sought to draw attention to? Shaviro says no to “Zizek’s hyper-voluntarism”, “Adorno’s ultra-pessimism”, J.K. Gibson-Graham’s positive affirmations and Hardt & Negri’s arguably misguided belief in “a universal, creative, and spontaneously collective class, ready to step in and take control of a world that has already been prepared for them.” So what’s left?

For Williams and Srnicek, at least initially, they see a kind of Leftist anti-praxis that we might say resonantes with Berger’s calls to embrace the anti-collective and my own suggestion that we should make ourselves worthy of the process. As they write in “On Cunning Automata”, discussed briefly the other day:

The opening up of the contingency of the universal, made possible by navigating beyond the suffocating politico-conceptual space of capital, does not entail the achievement of some ludicrous and properly impossible endpoint of ‘full communism’. A genuinely universal accelerative post-capitalism would be distinct from (and distinctly more interesting than) predictable Marxist utopias, given the necessary and indeed increased alienation of the human from the world in which they exist. This new world is not the end of history, but the beginning of a new and very different universal kind.

What is the result of increased alienation if not the nehationThis isn’t socialism as we know it, or communism as we know it either. It is a mode of acting wholly other to the political institutions we continue to use as life rafts in our present chaos. This is not an argument to abandon knowledge but at least organisational baggage. In this sense, it is most similar to the sorts of schizoanalytic praxis explored by Deleuze and Guattari but it is also a praxis which takes into account the latest developments within the capitalist model and its accompanying economic theories.

For me, then, anti-praxis is a kind of double articulation. It’s not purely a negation that hopes to disavow all leftist standpoints, but rather recast them in a new light. It is, in this sense, an attempt to be a nihilist with principles. This is not, as Cybertrop(h)ic believes, “bogging u/acc down in activism”. This is explicitly not the point of that post. It’s an attempt to get over both the left and right’s attempts to overcome the kind of “double articulation” so important to D+G’s original project — the double articulation of human potentiality with an awareness of the nature of the cosmos in which we are situated. (“Geology of Morals”, etc.) Such was D+G’s project of schizoanalysis too.

This has long been obscured from an accelerationist discourse and I don’t really understand why. Isn’t it D+G’s call to “accelerate the process” we’re paying heed to? Then why are we allergic to the contexts in which they made that statement?

I’ll have something clearer and more expansive on why I think this “double articulation” is important soon. Watch this space.

When I suggested in a previous post that Vincent Garton’s original anti-praxis position “resonates with more positions than many are willing to generously conceded — a more hubristic brand of environmentalism, for one”, I had Gary Snyder in mind, specifically the following anecdote from Jim Dodge’s forward to The Gary Snyder Reader:

After a full day of scholarly panels and speakers on various aspects of the poem [Mountains and Rivers Without End], Gary concluded the day’s discussion with some general responses and comments, then took a few questions from the audience. The last came from a young man who wanted to know what Gary had meant by the paradoxical statement that ends the seminal Four Changes: “Knowing that nothing need be done is the place from which we begin to move.” Gary replied — and here I’m working from memory — that Nature bats last, is eminently capable of caring for herself against destructive human foolishness, and no doubt will remain long after our demise. Nature doesn’t need us to save her.

I could feel the audience sag, then bristle. Someone called out, “Then why work to stop the destruction?”

Gary grinned hugely, leaned slightly forward, and replied without a quiver of hesitation, “Because it is a matter of character.” Then, with an absolutely wild glitter of delight in his eyes, added, “And it’s a matter of style.”

TL;DR? This, tbh — but about capital.

Below, a few more thoughts on the minor drama that that same post inaugurated on Twitter…

Capitalism ends in heat death. That is something that all “accelerationists” can surely agree on. That the right-accelerationist crowd suggest that we can’t have different responses to that statement (intellectually, practically, politically) seems to undermine their position that we should just kick back and welcome the Singularity. If it doesn’t matter, why do you care?

The retort to this is predictable: We don’t care; it’s just annoying that you do… Stop complicating my worldview and let me go back to reading Atlas Shrugged in peace…

@Insurrealist tagged @cyborg_nomade in the resulting thread, supposedly to undermine the argument made in my previous post about anti-praxis, but I found myself broadly in agreement with @cyborg_nomade’s response:

… acceleration is something for capital to do. accelerationism is basically measuring that and staying out of the way (which can be hard because, you know, monkey business) [1]

that said, I think my view differs considerably from @xenogothic’s (about as much as Land’s differed from Fisher’s). the thing I can agree with is that antipraxis isn’t “do nothing” – but rather do what you want, i.e., follow desire. [2]

“Staying out of the way” is, again, open to interpretation. No desire to tinker with capitalism here. (Might we make a case for “non-reformist reforms” being a kind of antipraxis?) Plus, following a desire for postcapitalism — no matter how seemingly contradictory; contradictions don’t stop anything else from appearing in this system — is surely one vector of travel. It’s for that reason that I replied:

No disagreement here at least, but the so-called pretzel logic is necessary if we’re going to address the fact that to “follow desire” is a non-argument in a system that monopolises desire so effectively. [1]

In those terms, “anti-praxis” does just feel like another way of saying “do nothing” but, for me at least and following Deleuze more closely than is perhaps fashionable in acc twitter discourse, I think there is (or should be) more to it than that. [2]

@cyborg_nomade responded to this by suggesting that it is also a question of whether you think capitalism’s monopolisation of desire is a bad thing — I think maybe yes — and this similarly raises questions around agency (ours and capitalism’s), which further complicates things a bit…

All of this is addressed, to some extent, in the previous two posts on anti-praxis and The Social Dilemma. Regarding social media, we can see how it is ever more difficult to ascertain if we really want what we say we want. It similarly demonstrates how capitalist agency constantly undermines what we think should be done. In this sense, questions of desire and agency — ours and capitalism’s — cannot be disentangled. That is why these questions should be at the centre of accelerationist discourse. Responding with “Do nothing” is still an answer to the question being asked; I don’t think it is an answer that negates the relevance of the question. The point is, perhaps, that it is far from the only answer available. In fact, it’s a pretty old and consistently challenged one within the early accelerationist blogosphere, as the post on anti-praxis hoped to highlight. This sort of disagreement is old, not new.

With that in mind, you have to wonder how the old r/acc crowd aren’t exhausted by now. They are very easily triggered by any attempt to decentre Nick Land from an accelerationist genealogy — emphasis on decentre rather than ahistorically remove. @ParallaxOptics, for instance, was disproportionately upset that I placed the beginning of accelerationism after most of its twentieth-century influences. Whilst paying heed to Vincent Garton’s warnings about unearthing the genealogy of accelerationism, I don’t see where the controversy is in deciding to straw a line between the word’s first usage and all that came before and influenced it. It is simply true that Benjamin Noys, in christening “accelerationism”, wasn’t talking about Land — in the context of the blogosphere, he was talking about Alex Williams. If that somehow decentres Land from the narrative, it does so pretty harmlessly.

But this is relevant here because it constitutes an obscured bridge between Land’s position and Fisher’s position — two figures always central to accelerationist discourse, and generally assumed to be the central pillars around which right- and left-accelerationisms revolve respectively. I previously thought this too but, having looking back through all the deleted blog posts, I don’t think it’s a very accurate framing of accelerationism’s initial battlegrounds.

For instance, as @cyborg_nomade adds to the hellthread:

I think the endgame is mostly succumbing to your own whatever (the real edgy part of Land’s position is the inevitability of doing precisely that). you do you. [1]

I believe (from the little I’ve read) that Fisher’s position is exactly towards *not* succumbing, about mastering the beast of instinct and following what’s rational no matter what. [2]

This is broadly accurate but, again, this limited perspective on how accelerationism emerged as a discourse obscures the fact that Fisher’s position was not contrary to Land’s but rather an extension of it. And, again, it wasn’t originally Fisher’s position anyway but rather Alex Williams’s — one which he seemed to convince Fisher to join him in exploring.

I think it is important to go back to that moment. Williams, in what I’d argue is the inaugural accelerationist blogpost — because it was his argument there that Noys first (publicly) described with use of that term — and irrespective of whether he or anyone else agrees with it anymore — puts forth a fundamentally Deleuzo-Guattarian, Lyotardian but also Landian position: “what is necessary is to think the in-itself of capitalism outside of any correlation to the human.” However, Williams complicates this with references to the Speculative Realism blogosphere, and particularly Alain Badiou and Ray Brassier. If accelerationism was anything in its first instance, then, it was “post-Landian”. It was dealing with his Nineties claims in the context of 2000s political philosophy. I’m fairly certain saying that won’t hurt Land’s feelings… After all, he was there on the periphery when it happened before taking more of an active role in the conversation, and even absorbing a number of Williams’ critiques into his own writing (much like capitalism itself likes to do).

Still, Williams’s initial provocations remain open to exploration. What he seemed to want to do was create a new foundation for working with the paradoxes of Landian / Badiouian thought. (An odd pair perhaps but both, in their own ways, have had dialogues with Lyotard.) As he put it on his blog: “Outside either a vitalist ethology of ‘natural’ auto-self-maximisation, or some kind of Marxist-Hegelian dialectical drive towards the elimination of contradiction in the same, how might we be able to ground … an inhumanising desubjectivation …?”

That’s an interesting question that has not yet been sufficiently answered.

Whether Williams and Srnicek will be happy to hear it or not, unearthing this from the web archive has resulted in some interesting discussions in private channels lately and I’m excited to see what fruit this bears in other people’s work. In fact, just last night there was a discussion around their essay “On Cunning Automata”, in which the pair’s initial questions come to some interesting conclusions. (It was a huge influence on me in 2017 when working and writing with the @_geopoetics bot.) Aly pulled out the following passage, for example, which shows where a lot of that early accelerationist chat was opening out onto. Unfortunately for some, it remains some of the most interesting application of this theory out there and, no, it doesn’t just come down to a load of “commie shit”:

Post-capitalism would unshackle the cunning automata of metic systems towards a universal accumulative strategy encompassing the entirety of the planetary, and eventually universal, system. Finance already has pretences towards becoming a universal system capable of correctly pricing and rendering interoperable all manner of things. However only the tacit, improvisatory, competitive, and above all cunning nature of technical entities could ever resolve the seemingly intractable problems associated with wide-scale social calculus. The opening up of the contingency of the universal, made possible by navigating beyond the suffocating politico-conceptual space of capital, does not entail the achievement of some ludicrous and properly impossible endpoint of ‘full communism’. A genuinely universal accelerative post-capitalism would be distinct from (and distinctly more interesting than) predictable Marxist utopias, given the necessary and indeed increased alienation of the human from the world in which they exist. This new world is not the end of history, but the beginning of a new and very different universal kind.

The Social Dilemma, a new documentary from Netflix, is a pretty fascinating watch, not least because it shows how well the tech industry understands what it is doing to us, and even how full of regret it is at its own impact. But, on the whole, this Netflix-hosted self-flagellation makes for a weird and somewhat confused watch.

On the one hand, there is a great deal of honesty from those who have run various social media platforms and who have found themselves getting high on their supply. Even those who have personally implemented various design choices that are intended to support the development of addictive relationships to technology find themselves falling victim to them. It is that realisation from within the tech industry itself that leads to the documentary’s most interesting conclusion: we are not in control of this thing we’ve given life to; it controls us, its creators, as much as it controls you.

On the other hand, there is this strangely decontextualized ignorance that lingers under the surface. This conclusion above, for starters, ends up obscured — even outright ignored and contradicted — by the end. They can’t quite maintain the critical distance they say is necessary. At one point, for instance, someone compares the invention of social media technologies to the bicycle, as a way to point out we’ve moved out of this innocuous “tools-based” stage in our technological development as a civilisation and we are instead in a place that is far more nefarious, where truth is a football for power to bend to its will. The bicycle never hurt anyone! But now our tools hurt people all the time, even when created with good intentions. The analogy serves its purpose but I’m pretty sure the printing press is about 400 years older than the bicycle… Surely there’s no technology more used and abused than that? I realy don’t think we can draw a clear line between innocuous and nefarious based on just the last 200-300 years alone.

What is taken for history, in this context, seems to be limited to the history of industrial capitalism, and it is precisely a compartmentalised analysis of this particular period of history that the documentary struggles with. I was left thinking that, if those the documentary features had a wider perspective, they might understand themselves better. There’s no doubt a further irony to this — I’m sure their limited perspectives are encouraged by their own search engine algorithms too. Indeed, throughout the documentary, we hear familiar lines from Marxist theory regurgitates and generalised for the (dis)information age. Time and again, there is a feeling that these people who implore us to better understand the dynamics of our present moment refuse to consider how these dynamics are the continuation of much of what has been discussed and predicted before — even up to hundred years ago.

Another example: at one point, one of the talking heads references The Truman Show and the fact that, as Ed Harris says in the movie, “”We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented. It’s as simple as that.” Lukács would call this the problem of immediacy. We might argue that Lukács’s argument against this in response still holds.

If the entire point is that we are being blinkered by the narcissism of social media — in a literal sense rather than a moralising sense; we are captured in reflections of our algorithmic selves that we think are reflections but are instead capitalist dynamics trying to keep us entranced with our touchscreens — then we have to take a step back and see the bigger picture beyond what the tech industry chooses to tell itself about itself.

If we are to stick with the Truman Show analogy, the tech industry is in that frightening and disorientating phase of questioning its very existence and sense of reality. But as far as this documentary is concerned, it shows a tech industry that hasn’t yet sailed to the edges of its world and hit the wall of the dome that it too is contained within — capitalism.

Suffice it to say, all of these things need to be addressed in their proper context, otherwise the argument will just fall back on a moral panic around the dissolution of social institutions.

Because this is what the documentary seems to really care about — the way that social media impacts social life. But not just any kind of social life — a neoliberal society that was, for a brief ideological moment, politically centrist and stable and unchanging. I don’t think that feedback loop is helpful, however. As the documentary makes clear from the start, social media is dangerous because it exacerbates and intensifies those emotions and dopamine hits that we get from our everyday social interactions. It’s not that social media makes social life better or worse, it just heightens it. It exacerbates the best and worse of us, and it does so in a specific context. It exacerbates social competition, for instance, and our own selection mechanisms.

This is something that’s bugging me more and more at the moment regarding how we relate to one another online. Call it “cancel culture” if you want, but isn’t what we’re experiencing more intensely just the implementation of a kind of horizontalism within the attention economy? I’m sure celebrities and those in the public eye would tell you that they’ve been treated in these same ways for much of the last century. Now, truly, everyone can be hated for fifteen minutes.

The segment on the mental health of Gen Z is pretty harrowing in this regard, where it explains that, since the ascendance of social media to social dominance in around 2009, suicides amongst teens and pre-teens has risen by hundreds of percent, but the response is that we need to regulate and reform and restrict. Children shouldn’t see certain types of advertising, they say, rather than questioning how that advertising affects adults in much the same way (but they’re fair game). This is to say that those who are supposedly the most concerned focus on moral panics rather than the flaws endemic to the actual system in which they are operating.

Why the impact is so intense for Gen Z is perhaps demonstrated inadvertently in a little dramatized subplot where a young man bets his Mom that he can go without his phone for a week. We see him in his bedroom, which is almost totally bare except for a display of his collection of sneakers, going bored out of his mind. I thought to myself, whilst watching this, I’d probably just go and read a book or watch a DVD or something but, of course, the platforms that make his phone so central in his life have already begun to monopolise the delivery systems for these kinds of product. Without a phone, I’m sure plenty of kids can’t even engage in other generally wholesome cultural activities. It’s a segment that says, “How sad, this boy can’t keep himself entertained without his phone”, but when your entire life has been streamlined by these companies to revolve around a phone, who can honestly expect a teenager to keep themselves entertained in other ways? Again, this isn’t an issue that children need protecting from — this is a side effect of the changes made to culture by Silicon Valley as a whole. And so, the issue here really isn’t limiting access to phones, but rather addressing the primary driver behind the development of how they are used — not by consumers but by the companies that sell them and sell our attention once it is captured by them.

Again, the documentary gets so very close to addressing the elephant in the room, but it always pulls back. There is another very telling segment that is downright accelerationist, where Tristan Harris mentions how, as a species, we are wholly unprepared to deal with the ever-accelerating consequences of Moore’s law on an increasingly technologised subjectivity. In a confused moment of soft-Landianism, he explains:

Human beings, at a mind and body and sort of physical level, are not going to fundamentally change. We can do genetic engineering and develop new kinds of human beings in the future but, realistically speaking, you’re living inside of hardware — a brain — that was, like, millions of years old, and then there’s this screen, and then on the opposite side of the screen there’s these thousands of engineers and supercomputers that have goals that are different to your goals, and so who’s gonna win in that game? Who’s gonna win?

The thing that warrants questioning — and which this documentary occasionally shines a light on before oddly stopping at or obscuring the seemingly obvious conclusion — is the system underlying it. Capitalism.

For instance, The Social Dilemma repeatedly makes the mistake, I think, of humanising the problem. There are scenes that dramatize the thinking of an AI that is trying to continuously lure in a consumer, demonstrated by three identical dudes stood in front of a data-driven representation of this kid we’re following around in short vignettes, revealing him to be on the verge of radicalisation-by-algorithm as he devours conspiracy theories and the violent responses to them. (Pizzagate is the obvious real-world example pointed out here.) But, as we’ve seen, and as the documentary has told us itself, there aren’t benevolent programmers watching over our every move. They’re victims of it too! The documentary is mistaken to make the algorithm seem nefarious. It’s not — it is simply indifferent about what it is pushing onto us, to capture and then sell our attention. That’s all it cares about — selling.

Clearly, the elephant in the room here is capitalism. Clearly. But it is never discussed. In fact, what is seen as being under threat is a kind of stable neoliberal centrism. As the documentary draws to a close, the repeated point made is that social media is eroding social norms. Joe Toscano, former Experience Design Consultant at Google and author of the book Automating Humanity, at one point says: “You have this [unrest] in Germany, Spain, France, Brazil, Australia. Some of the most ‘developed nations’ in the world are now imploding on each other, and what do they have in common?” The question is rhetorical but the answer is seemingly social media. It’s not — it’s capitalism. It is capitalism that selects for these things. Social media is a by-product of capitalism and runs according to capitalist logics. It’s capitalism capitalism capitalism capitalism.

The documentary repeatedly makes the case for this itself but it just never joins the dots. It starts off by demonstrating that the reason for all of this control and manipulation is that these companies are selling our attention. There’s no other reason for encouraging this kind of behaviour in us other than to make sure we’re looking and then looking at the things it wants us to look at. But then it moves so far away from this point, towards a kind of humanistic moralism, that the primary driver behind this panic — algorithmically-driven capitalism — is let completely off the hook.

That being said, it is a point that comes up in passing multiple times. The best analogy made comes from Jaron Lanier, who says:

One of the ways I try to get people to understand just how wrong feeds from places like Facebook are is to think about Wikipedia. When you go to a page, you’re seeing the same thing as other people. So, it’s one of the few things online that we at least hold in common. Now, just imagine for a second that Wikipedia said, “We’re gonna give each person a different customized definition [of a word or concept], and we’re gonna get paid for that!” So, Wikipedia would be spying on you, Wikipedia would calculate, “What’s the thing I can do to get this person to change a little bit on behalf of some commercial interest?” Right? And then it would change the entry. Can you imagine that? Well, you should be able to, ’cause that’s exactly what’s happening on Facebook.

The irony of this is powerful. When I was at school, Wikipedia was blacklisted not because it was a lazy source to draw on but because it could be changed by anyone and so couldn’t be trusted. How strange to think that, now, it might be one of the few trustworthy sites left. However, that is only if we ignore the influence of social media disinformation on Wikipedia itself. (Anyone with any sense of the vast changes made to the “accelerationism” Wikipedia page over the course of its history will be able to document that process in real time.)

In Lanier’s analogy, capitalism is implicated in all but name. So why is the punch not allowed to land? What is in the way other than the kind of ideological blinkeredness that the whole enterprise is supposed to be critiquing?

Any reader of this blog would no doubt see this capitalist-realist blind spot coming from a mile off. From the very beginning of the documentary, many of those who are initially interviewed begin discussing their discomfort with their own inventions and designs in the world of social media and they make a point that gives the documentary its title. They argue, “We have a problem but we don’t really know what to call it”, as if to say they appreciate that something has gone wrong but they don’t have all the pieces to complete the pictures, so they simply call it our “social dilemma”.

It is telling that this dilemma as a multitude of names, offered up by many critics of contemporary capitalism. Jodi Dean called it “communicative capitalism”, for instance; Mark Fisher had about half a dozen names for the intersecting problems that give communicative capitalism its seemingly amorphous form — “touchscreen capture”, “libidinal engineering”, “semioblitz”, et al.

For each and every one, capitalism is central to the discussion at hand. But not here. When our attention is turned to Russia’s interference in the 2016 US election, one talking head makes the point that Russia didn’t hack Facebook, it simply used the tools provided by it for its own aims. But this talking head makes the point that this is immoral in a weird sort of way — those tools were put in place for “legitimate advertisers and legitimate users”, he says. What does that even mean? Isn’t it precisely that kind of arrogance that leads to these other nations to so easily humiliate the West? The arrogance that what is “legitimate” is a Western (and increasingly American) brand of communicative capitalism and it is a given that this should be the only game in town. The results of this naivety have been catastrophic, but you’d hope it had been at least a usefully Copernican humiliation: you (the tech industry and the US) are not the centre of the system you have built. It seems it hasn’t quite hit that button for some of these old tech bros. The lesson they demonstrate but can’t see is that their continued cultural imperialism creates new vectors for your enemies to get inside your head. (It brings to mind a version of Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia, updated for the social media age — instead of the petropolitics of oil, try the libidinal engineering of Facebook.)

I think the most telling image in the whole documentary in this regard comes not long after this shamelessly blinkered comment. We see news footage, supposedly filmed from a helicopter, showing protestors and counter-protestors in what I think is Berkeley, aimlessly pushing around a big wheelie bin. The documentary might be making a similar sort of visual point here — social media has left us fighting impotently over our own deeply-polarised trash — but the documentary itself is just another victim of its own critique. It’s not looking at the issue from far enough out.

As was discussed earlier today, capitalism works by breaking itself down. If you want to fix things, you have to get to the root of the problem, not stay lingering on the level of the social, which is precisely where we are presently at our most impotent and vulnerable.

But, instead, the documentary concludes that we must reform capitalism. We need to redirect the “financial incentives” that have driven us towards this “like” culture of conspiracy theory proliferation. A tree or a whale is worth more dead than alive, someone argues, and so too are we worth more mental unwell and addicted to our devices. If we want to save the world and our own sanity, we need to bend capitalism to the will of our positive humanisms or environmentalisms or technologisms. It is a pipe dream. This is always how capitalism has worked. Capitalism and capitalists have never cared about the wellbeing of the “proletariat”, working in factories. Not really. Reforms might be made to improve safety and incentivise work and absorb critiques into the system itself but that is because capitalism has always been an attention economy, shifting from one that disciplines to one that controls.

Suggesting we need to reform the attention economy within the bounds of capitalism is a ridiculous utopian variant on capitalist realism. This is how capitalism operates and always has. But that’s not to say what is being argued for isn’t worth pursuing. We just need to update the language we are comfortable with using to make explicit that it is that we say we want. For instance, what these tech folks are really arguing for, I’d argue, although I’m sure they’d never admit it to themselves, is a kind of socialist media: a social media that is decentralised and not shaped by corporations and is instead shaped by the people who use it, as the internet arguably was in its initial moment of emergence. There is a glimmer of that argument here but it is repeatedly ignored. At some point you just have to say the obvious:

Whether online or offline, the choice is socialism or extinction.

Update #1: Shouts to @YNGLegionnaire for sharing the following thread, which confronts “the fake genuflecting that techbros and ‘surveillance capitalists’ are hiding behind” in The Social Dilemma:

NB: I was going to save this post for tomorrow, but my earlier post from today set off a load of the usual whining suspects, either upset about apparently disrespecting Daddy Land or being too philosophical.

The former is to be expected at this point — the only reason I can imagine half the old right-accelerationist crowd can’t wait for heat death is to put them out of their own pathetic misery — whilst the latter shows the myopia of the other side. When Marx said we had to change the world instead of just interpreting it, he wasn’t advocating for some kind of anti-intellectualism. All your politics, no matter how “material”, are based on someone’s hard-to-parse prose. Dumbing shit down for a working class you assume can’t read it is the worst take. The goal should be to offer everyone the chance to educate themselves about issues that affect them, as well as the histories of those issues. Prose isn’t the problem, it’s access to education.

Anyway, if the shot hit you a little too hard, here’s a chaser without delay. This post works as a stand-alone glorified review of a new Netflix documentary but I think it is worth highlighting how today’s earlier philosophizing is directly relevant to this confused critique of social media.

This post indirectly demonstrates the “crisis of negation” (and of praxis) at the heart of accelerationism in 2020. Silicon Valley isn’t driving acceleration, it’s stunting it, because it — like most — can’t see the woods for the trees.