Genomes, biosensors and smart grids are objects that accelerate and intensify. They are ways of speeding up processes of mediation, technological change and capital. The genome speeds up and intensifies data creation, collection and processing. It speeds up the identification or diagnosis of diseases and other health conditions. But it doesn't decelerate, by which I mean it doesn't enable reflection or take account of experience, or of its own history. Smart grids speed up device production, fast-tracking the financing of some projects, but they inhibit reflection on a more collective approach. For example, the proposal to connect Iceland's energy resources to the UK mainland but to leave out Orkney is about grand promises and capital accumulation, not the pragmatics of national scales. The development of wind farms and solar panels out of materials at least as problematic as fossil fuels is not an inevitable technological given but a design choice. All these things can be changed but they have to be linked to collective political thinking, not driven by the technological object looking for a market. Accelerationism, in both its reach beyond the current horizon via technological evolutionism, and in iterations which head towards singularity, is on the side of the technological object looking for a market.
Kate O'Riordan, Unreal Objects: Digital Materialities, Technoscientific Projects and Political Realities