#accelerationism

[freegazafromhamas]

Accelerationism:

[escuerzoresucitado]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

More Everything Forever

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me at NEW ZEALAND'S UNITY BOOKS in AUCKLAND on May 2, and in WELLINGTON on May 3. More tour dates (Pittsburgh, PDX, London, Manchester) here.

Astrophysicist Adam Becker knows a few things about science and technology – enough to show, in a new book called More Everything Forever that the claims that tech bros make about near-future space colonies, brain uploading, and other skiffy subjects are all nonsense dressed up as prediction:

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/adam-becker/more-everything-forever/9781541619593/

Becker investigates the personalities, the ideologies, the coalitions, the histories, and crucially, the grifts behind such science fictional pursuits as infinite life-extension, space colonization, automation panic, AI doomerism, longtermism, effective altruism, rationalism, and conciousness uploading.

This is, loosely speaking, the bundle of ideologies that Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres dubbed TESCREAL (transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, (modern) cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL

While these are largely associated with modern Silicon Valley esoteric techbros (and the odd Oxfordian like Nick Bostrom), they have very deep roots, which Becker excavates – like Nikolai Fyodorov's 18th century "cosmism," a project to "scientifically" resurrect everyone who ever lived inside of a simulation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Fyodorov_(philosopher)

In their modern incarnation, these ideas largely originate in science fiction novels. That is to say, they were made up and popularized by people like me, the vast majority of whom made no pretense of being able to predict the future or even realistically describe a path from the present to the future they were presenting. Science fiction is something between a card trick and a consensual con game, where the writer shows you just enough detail to make you think that the rest of it must be lurking somewhere in the wings. No one in sf has ever explained how consciousness uploading could possibly work, and neither have any of the advocates for consciousness uploading – the difference is that (most of) the sf writers know they're just making stuff up.

Becker's central question is how many "smart" people (some of them very smart and accomplished, others merely very certain that they are smart despite all evidence to the contrary) can mistake futuristic allegories made up by pulp writers for prophesy?

In answering this question, he uncovers a corollary of Upton Sinclair's famous maxim that "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it," namely, that "it is easy to get a person to believe something when doing so will make them feel good about themselves."

The beliefs that Becker explores in this book sometimes make the believers rich (like the AI grifters who run around shouting about AI taking over the world and turning us all into paperclips). Sometimes, they make their believers feel good about being selfish assholes (like longtermism, which holds that all the misery in the world today is worth it if you can make 24 heptillion hypothetical simulated people just a little happy in 10,000 years). Sometimes, they make their believers feel good about life after death, or eternal life – the same pitch that religions have been roping in followers with since the stone age.

What differentiates these beliefs from other faith-based claims is that their followers claim that they aren't operating on faith, but on science, reason and rationality. This is where the fact that Becker is a bona fide astrophysicist comes in. Not only is he personally qualified to debunk claims about space colonization, but he's also familiar with the rigorous process of scientific inquiry, and capable of consulting experts and listening to them. That's how he concludes, for example, that having your head cut off and frozen when you die is just a form of corpse mutilation, with a zero point zero zero zero zero percent chance of someone recovering your mind from your freezerburned brain.

Like his subjects, Becker has a complicated relationship with science fiction. He, too, enjoys the imaginative flights of the genre, its delightful thought-experiments, its gnarly moral conundra. I love these too. They make for a fascinating and often useful lens for understanding and challenging our own relationship with technology and our very humanity. Ultimately, Becker is exploring the difference between reading sf because it makes you think in new ways, and reading sf as a kind of prophetic text, and – crucially – he's asserting that it's perfectly possible to enjoy this stuff without organizing your moral life around hypothetical heptillions of virtual people living in the year 25,000; or, indeed, having your head cut off and frozen.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/22/vinges-bastards/#cyberpunk-is-a-warning-not-a-suggestion

[prof-grace-aspen]

A term I learned a while back is "accelerationist", and I want to discuss it here, because a lot of the anti-voting leftists on Tumblr are accelerationists. They intentionally want to accelerate the bad things happening in society, to intensify those things, in order to bring about societal collapse, the "glorious revolution", whatever they call it. They want rapid change and they are tired of waiting for it to happen naturally, so they are attempting to orchestrate the conditions necessary to cause this collapse. To them, a Trump presidency is a win, because he will further destabilize our society.

Vote. Vote for Biden, who isn't going to exacerbate the decline of our society, vote for the guy who at the very least will maintain the status quo and who has in many instances actually helped progress us forward. Vote against Trump, against the man who has openly stated he intends to be a "Day 1 dictator", and who has members of his party supporting a document that outlines a several-year long plan to destabilize our democracy and turn it into a dictatorship.

[kenyatta]

In terms of the currently accepted picture of the relation of man to technics, our age is passing from the primeval state of man, marked by his invention of tools and weapons for the purpose of achieving mastery over the forces of nature, to a radically different condition, in which he will have not only conquered nature, but detached himself as far as possible from the organic habitat. With this new ‘megatechnics’ the dominant minority will create a uniform, all-enveloping, super-planetary structure, designed for automatic operation. Instead of functioning actively as an autonomous personality, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man’s role, will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of de-personalized, collective organizations.

Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon of Power (1970)

[vintage-tigre]

[ssjkamui-digitalphoenixug]

Yesterday, I Finished the newst 2 quests in genshin.

I ofcourse noticed that symbol in the upper left corner on the screen. That looked vaguely familiar.

Here the time Spiral by british philosopher nick land. It's almost the same symbol. And lands symbol is based on the kabbala and when Sandrone develops the symbol, in a book on the desk, you directly see the kabbala next to it.

And ofcourse, nick lands symbol is connected to the emergence of AI and 2 robots help sandrone develop that symbol.

And Nick lands symbol, also known as the time Spiral, is about someone sending messages into the past to influence the past and to create a desired future and to create itself "reteocausally".

That is exactly what columbina does.

[aretheygayvideos]

Accelerationism: A Reintroduction [NEW VIDEO]

A nearly 2 HOURS lecture on Accelerationism is now available exclusively on my Patreon.

There's a lot of spicy stuff in there that I CANNOT talk about on the main channel. Sex toys and sexy post-structuralist theorists? Finally. Many have heard about Accelerationism as a radical and destructive idea, but less are familiar with what accelerationist philosophers actually say and want. I think their work is more important than ever in a time of intense crisis. From feudalism to 4chan, Nick Land to Donald Trump, Cuteness to Abundance, Wal-Mart to Marx, this lecture has it ALL!!!!!!! As I'm working on a huge video on the wellness industry for the main channel, your support on Patreon helps fund the main channel work and keep it free and accessible to all.

https://www.patreon.com/c/aretheygay