version

Well-known member
Major (potentially pseudointellectual) industry leaders referencing Nick Land:


We believe the techno-capital machine of markets and innovation never ends, but instead spirals continuously upward.

[...]

We believe in accelerationism – the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development – to ensure the fulfillment of the Law of Accelerating Returns. To ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever.


Why does he feel the need to do anything to ensure it continues forever when he claims to believe the upward spiral never ends in the first place?
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
For context, his VC firm, a16z, is a major source of venture funding for web3 and probably AI too. They're one of those firms which place a lot of really big bets, probably expecting most of them to fail, in hopes of catching a unicorn "killer app"-style product/service which can yield exponential returns. They've probably got a couple of them in the past, but I don't know their funding history.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
We believe the techno-capital machine of markets and innovation never ends, but instead spirals continuously upward.

[...]

We believe in accelerationism – the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development – to ensure the fulfillment of the Law of Accelerating Returns. To ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever.


Why does he feel the need to do anything to ensure it continues forever when he claims to believe the upward spiral never ends in the first place?

because he's a venal bourgeois who wants to accept naturalism in science, but have his petty little fantasies, just like biscuits, of ingesting 27 tabs of lsd and learning nothing in the process, and predicating his conscious existence on the ideal. The world might not be real, but I really exist. What if I am a brain in a vat, guys, guys, guys?
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Here I call for a similar project, but without this facile sense of fatalistic acceleration, and with an emphasis on public goods.


you need to deflate your ego first, by realising that many have tried, unsuccessfully. The thing about Stalinists, and why Gus is so horrified by them, is because they are excellent managers of capitalism. Quite successful in that sense.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
you need to deflate your ego first, by realising that many have tried, unsuccessfully. The thing about Stalinists, and why Gus is so horrified by them, is because they are excellent managers of capitalism. Quite successful in that sense.
I don't think that's true? Stalinsim was mostly characterised by the waste of the gulag system and systemic distortion of economic results which is the whole edifice fell over in the late 80s.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I don't think that's true? Stalinsim was mostly characterised by the waste of the gulag system and systemic distortion of economic results which is the whole edifice fell over in the late 80s.

two things here

1) I was talking about contemporary capitalism I.E: China, Russia etc. Many ex-aparachiks became excellent managers.
2) it is true that the soviet type economy was wasteful and underperformed with distortion of economic results, but his was precisely because the soviet society was in transition to a capitalism. The contradiction they were faced with was how to maintain planning with the obligatory competition required in capitalist enterprises. Now, it is true that the state is always present within capitalism, but what is important to note there is the higher levels of centralisation result from a higher level of capitalist development. The soviet societies could not really be centrally planned, at least not in the economic sense. If anything, plants would often diverge from the centre to satisfy targets. Put another way, the contradiction was between private capitalism in the villages and the countryside, and state capitalism in the industrial centres. Hence why the Stalinist bureaucracy took a contradictory position wrt the peasantry.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
you need to deflate your ego first, by realising that many have tried, unsuccessfully. The thing about Stalinists, and why Gus is so horrified by them, is because they are excellent managers of capitalism. Quite successful in that sense.
Ego deflation, definitely. But one thing which is good about this, is that there is already a vanguard industry of sorts working on exactly this, it just seems more spontaneous than world-historically self-aware. Peer-to-peer shared virtual machines, which can run smart contracts (which are like algorithmic building blocks for digital organizations), all very "capture-resistant" meaning that even leading state actors would have a difficult time shutting this stuff down.

Anyway, just saying that what I'm describing in this piece is actually already happening, EG I myself am currently helping run a grants program using open-source smart contracts. At an ecosystem level, in terms of other people building/managing similar "public goods" projects, it constitutes a hyperstructure of sorts, IE coordination infrastructure built on the permaweb.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
My point is, a lot of this stuff isn't theoretical, it works. The question is, could it work at societal scale? Right now, no way. A lot of stuff needs to change, such as accessibility of this tech (major UX issues still), optics around the tech (everyone still conflates it with crypto), regulatory ambiguity, etc.
 

vimothy

yurp
We believe the techno-capital machine of markets and innovation never ends, but instead spirals continuously upward.

[...]

We believe in accelerationism – the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development – to ensure the fulfillment of the Law of Accelerating Returns. To ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever.


Why does he feel the need to do anything to ensure it continues forever when he claims to believe the upward spiral never ends in the first place?
you could ask land the same question - although what he believes the outcome will be is quite at odds (hilariously so) with andreesen and co
 

version

Well-known member
you could ask land the same question - although what he believes the outcome will be is quite at odds (hilariously so) with andreesen and co

Yeah, seems ridiculous to positively cite Land if you're hoping the outcome is "pro-human" and that "the machines work for us".
 

version

Well-known member
As far as dodgy manifestos go, I'd rather read Marinetti. At least he had some literary flair.

4. We affirm that the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath - a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
 

version

Well-known member
Bifo on Marinetti:

"One hundred years after the publication of the Futurist Manifesto, speed has been transferred from the realm of external machines to the information domain. Speed itself has been internalised. In the twentieth century, the machine of speed accomplished the colonisation of global space; this was followed by the colonisation of the domain of time, of the mind and perception; and so the future collapsed. The collapse of the future is rooted in the acceleration of psychic and cognitive rhythm."

 

vimothy

yurp
Bifo on Marinetti;

"One hundred years after the publication of the Futurist Manifesto, speed has been transferred from the realm of external machines to the information domain. Speed itself has been internalised. In the twentieth century, the machine of speed accomplished the colonisation of global space; this was followed by the colonisation of the domain of time, of the mind and perception; and so the future collapsed. The collapse of the future is rooted in the acceleration of psychic and cognitive rhythm."

aka the development of the realm of pure immanence - the "plane of consistency"
 
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