The future is bright or so some say. The story being sold is one in which human ingenuity eventually prevails over a great pandemic. A flotilla of vaccines vanquish the virus and its legion variants so humanity can resume the onward march of progress. Bullish positivity abounds, much of it centred around technology and the economic wonders it will yield in a new 21st Century Roaring Twenties.
Noted futurologist Calum Chace concurs:
Despite this pre-dawn darkness, the Roaring Twenties will probably be the best decade in human history so far – and also the most interesting and the most important one.
There are reasons to believe. Despite periodic recessions the long term trend line for shares remains firmly upwards on a broadly exponential trajectory. A dollar invested in 1932 tracking the Dow Jones index would be worth almost $300 today. Who would bet against this trend continuing unabated through the next decade?
Technology driven positivism is everywhere. Tech stocks have been at the forefront of the stock market boom. Their extraordinary weightless rise has gone into overdrive over the last year and money itself has become a target of disruption. There’s a rush on SPACs, cash-borne viral loads searching for organisations to genetically recombine with. Everyone is buying cryptocurrency and NFTs are exploding the art world even though many view them as “an ecological nightmare pyramid scheme”.
The prospect of helicopter money to buy our way back to business as usual now seems entirely normalised. Musk and Bezos are talking about Mars and moon manufacturing as though it were a roadmap item on a company 5 year plan. Scott Galloway is confident of a post-Covid entrepreneurial sonic boom centred on the normalisation of remote versions of work, higher education and healthcare. Over on Clubhouse, Will.i.am is talking up the age as one of boundless possibility unleashed through the democratisation of artificial intelligence for the masses.
Your digital avatar or doppelgänger, equipped with machine-learning and natural language, will be able to do interviews, have conversations, do performances, sell things, know exactly who your fans are, talk to a million people at once
Meanwhile at the outer reaches of the current news cycle Trump 2.0 is emerging broadly unscathed from the gonzo melee at the Capitol he egged on just three months ago and far from being chastened, is seeking to set up a social network of his own to rival those that ejected him.
We are dimly aware the recovery from Covid is uneven and many people are having it bad. However, techno-optimism focuses on those who are defying gravity, the upward arc of the K-shaped rebound. For adherents we are living in the Big Long and we should all go with the flow and double down:
Everything is working. Everyone is making money. Enjoy the moment while it lasts. If this isn’t nice, what is?
After all, what else is there to do but gamble?
This unbounded confidence in technology and capital as the fundamental drivers of progress and the belief that they should be unshackled from the constraint of oversight is characteristic of the philosophy of Accelerationism:
“the idea that capitalism and technological change can and, depending on variants, should be "accelerated" and drastically exaggerated to trigger unprecedented revolt and the subsequent upholding of new, unique systems
Accelerationism as manifest destiny has moved from fringe to ascendent in the last few years filling the void left behind after big ideas about society vacated the stage. It is a philosophy that has obvious attraction for the techno-utopian elite that run big tech companies and increasingly therefore the world. A way of justifying the cultural dominance of technology, it is bound to exert a wider and more pervasive and baleful influence over politics and society in the Roaring Twenties. This should not come as a huge surprise. The movement is merely the natural libertarian successor to Randian Objectivism which has been the dominant philosophy underpinning neoliberalism for 40 years. Rand believed in “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity”. Accelerationism builds on heroic individualism suggesting technology and capitalism are the mechanisms that will enable humanity to attain the ultimate goal of information liberation. It demands our full body embrace of a cybernetic future in which we are either replaced by machines or merge with them to achieve a state of apotheosis. This transhumanist trajectory has been covered by in the last few years by other writers, notably Yuval Harari in Homo Deus. In the book, Harari also posits that the next phase of the development of homo sapiens will see the rise of a new creed he calls dataism which elevates information above humanistic concerns. He suggests that Dataism is the first major belief system since the Enlightenment that removes humans from the centre of the story with data supplanting our apex position. Harari at least conveys a sense of an ending and mournful regret about our great replacement. Accelerationists like Nick Land, however, widely seen as its chief theorist, are far more brutal:
Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.
Land’s prodigious and dense output spans many years arcing back to the 90s in the famed CCRU at Warwick University. Enough of it is available online to form a sense of his philosophy. This helpful summary provides the following description:
The idea of accelerationism is that we should keep capitalism going, keep technology going, go with the flow of technology even if it destroys humanity and everything we love. After all, there's no alternative. And why resist? It's glorious to burn up like a shooting star, like the fuel of a rocket that accelerates into empty space.
Land has a specific obsession with what he calls “capital autonomization” or freeing money from the moorings of state and social control. He “equates it with techno-productive growth and modernization” but the concept also seems aligned with a world in which power shifts from individuals and nations to corporations and more amorphous decentralised entities like blockchains.
A long and revealing 2018 interview with Land makes clear the extent of his embrace of iconoclasm. He seeks nothing less than to transcend history by destroying all forms of control suggesting “a lot of the actual fabric, the social historical fabric, is actually a containment system”. Land supplies a memorable image:
You have a pile of radioactive rods that are damped down by graphite containment rods, and you start pulling out those graphite rods, and at a certain point it goes critical and you get an explosion. … It just is a positive feedback process that passes through some threshold and goes critical. And so I would say that’s the sense [in which] capitalism has always been there. It’s always been there as a pile with the potential to go critical, but it didn’t go critical until the Renaissance, until the dawn of modernity, when, for reasons that are interesting, enough graphite rods get pulled out and the thing becomes this self-sustaining, explosive process.
He roundly dismisses detractors as reactionaries. Particular venom is reserved for those on the left who ostensibly sit on the opposite side of the political spectrum. In this terrain, though, the libertarian right and left blur into one in a political strange loop. Consider for instance the proponents of fully automated luxury communism (FALC) who along with their fellow post-scarcity anarchists are techno-utopians who believe that:
the development of technology under capitalism will lead to the end of work and the end of capitalism itself. In this scenario somehow capitalism assists at its own death, it voluntarily places a gun against its own temple and pulls the trigger. Technology, rather than being seen at the moment as an instrument of capitalism to further itself, is seen as an agent of radical change.
The distinction that makes more sense here is the one between dynamists and statists defined by Virginia Postrel in her prophetic book The Future and its Enemies. In that context it is entirely natural for objectors of any form to be considered Luddites that would interfere with or block what are seen as inevitable evolutionary processes propelled by technology.
Accelerationism as a belief system remains curiously devoid of genuine empathy for humanity, concerning itself with liberation of the means of production without any real obvious interest in what you could do with it once freed. Land is quite open about his distance from prosaic concerns about human suffering:
Already in the 1990s, my interest is in the emancipation of the means of production. I have zero commitment to emancipation in any way defined by our dominant political discourses. I’m not into emancipated human groups, an emancipated human species, who reaches species-being to emancipate human individuals … None of that to me is of the slightest interest, so in using this word of emancipation, sure, I will totally nod along to it if what is meant by that is capital autonomization. … I think what the left means by emancipation is freedom from capital autonomization.
the actual, practical, social force of conservatism — all of what would be called “reaction” — is the political left. The political left is the thing that is set essentially against the imperative to accelerate the process.
James Lovelock’s recent book Novacene reveals him to be a fellow convert albeit not quite as extreme as Land. In the book he suggests the future of humanity lies in transmuting solar energy into information. He supports the view that humanity will eventually be replaced by our machines and hypothesises that they may assume the form of glowing shapeshifting flying spheres:
The intelligence that launches the age that follows the Anthropocene will not be human; it will be something wholly different from anything we can now conceive. It’s logic, unlike ours, will be multidimensonal.
Lovelock may be 100 years old but is remarkably imaginative and cheery at being rendered obsolete. An avowed iconoclast happy to quote Henry Ford in a robust rejection of nostalgia quite uncharacteristic of fellow centurions:
“History is more or less the bunk. It is tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
The dominant image left by Accelerationism is the orange glow of burning. The sharp metallic residue of rocket fuel exhaust in the morning. The unique profligacy of energy waste and carbon dioxide being pumped into the air and from there, the oceans, acidifying them in an instant in geological time to levels not seen for 50 million years. The real impact of that development is only now beginning to be understood. Close your eyes and stand on the corner of a busy street. Smell the emissions all around you and sense what it means. The future is being created by the millions of small fires inside of cars, planes, heaters and hearths worldwide. Accelerationism tends not to dwell on this and invites you instead into a chronocentric fever dream in which we leapfrog to a new world. We’ve been here before. Filippo Marinetti’s Futurism offered the same seductive and exciting modernist appeal a hundred years ago and was channelled by WWI enthusiasts:
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary;
A confidence in our ability to control Nature. A joyous Leap into the Void like Yves Klein’s magically decoupled from the ineluctable laws of Physics:
Ranged against Accelerationism is a motley crew of liberal conservatives and social democrats spread across the ineffectual political middle ground. This cohort has been in retreat in the west for decades since its high point in the 1970s. Ideas of community have been submerged under the assault of individualism. Individuals however can do little to resist that assault. New types of organisation such as the holacratic structure used by Extinction Rebellion are needed to prevent the slide into greater inequality between the rich and poor and counter the climate emergency. For the skeptics, tech is the problem not the solutions. When coupled with capitalism it represents a new form of colonialism even more nihilistic than the last:
There is much more going in this picture. An ecological crisis created by capitalism is rapidly threatening to permanently destroy life on Earth, and solutions for the digital economy must intersect with environmental justice and broader struggles for equality.
Accelerationism is closely linked to the current 40 year unbound neoliberal experiment. During this period we have already “raised the control rods” practicing a form of extractive capitalism which has largely ignored its impact on the environment. That position is increasingly untenable:
anti-extractivism is about focusing on what type of life we want to achieve as a whole and how we build global systems of justice. We can nourish ourselves from several non-extractivist modes of production and reproduction that center on a dignified life for all.
It’s all part of a growing sense that tech is the problem not the solution to our environmental and climate problems on earth and it cannot halt our acceleration towards an encounter with the hyperobject of climate change. In this worldview, living within our limitations is central to existing in harmony with the world. This natural theory of constraints was embodied in the ancient world by the symbol of the Ouroboros. It provides a distinct contrast to all things unbound:
The degrowth movement that originated with 19th century thinkers like Thoreau and Ruskin likewise championed a “back to nature” philosophy of simplicity. Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics is an attempt to bring this idea of restraint into thinking about 21st century economic sustainability. It’s being embraced by Amsterdam as a model for the future city. At its heart lies acceptance that living within our means is more important than growth.
Rather than a continual increase in GDP, our goal should be for everyone to live in the “doughnut.”
Acting with restraint within natural limits is antithetical to Accelerationists who do not subscribe to the view there should be any. For this reason the two factions appear to be on a fundamental collision course with opposing visions for the future. The struggle between them will define the next stage of human history. Both sides can present arguments to support their cause. The dynamist Accelerationists are right that we cannot put the genie of technology back in the bottle; our very survival depends upon it for better or worse. The statist Resistance are right that we cannot avoid the unfolding disaster of climate catastrophe, merely mitigate it. If we accept these premises there are divergent directions the future will take depending on which group prevails. In the former case, we face Petri Dish Earth. In the latter, a White Knight scenario looms.
The Petri Dish Earth vision of the future, the techno-capitalist system circumvents all efforts at containment and those in control operate without supervision. Opposition is ineffectual and unable to resist. Authoritarianism aided by technology becomes the dominant political system. In the West it eats democracy itself which slides into unelected autocracy. Many seem oblivious to this eventuality. It may become reality sooner than many imagine if liberal democracies fail to deliver satisfactory outcomes and attractive demagogues who model themselves on corporate leaders move in. When Elon Musk boasts about being the technoking, he’s really channelling this:
[the] philosophy of Neoreactionism ("Dark Enlightenment"), the idea that democracy sucks and monarchy/CEO-president works better
Mass surveillance is employed to ensure power. Protests are repressed and a form of neo-feudal state control emerges. The early experiments are already taking place in China and India.
Environmental and climate damage continues unabated eventually resulting in disaster when natural resource limits are reached. Accelerationists may not care. The movement is simply a modern variation on an apocalyptic stain that has always been close by with homo sapiens. Its teleology is the same as that expressed by the soldiers who daubed Apocalypse Now in the jungle. Musk is our Kurtz. We are all in his army now. Meanwhile, our destruction of the environment continues unabated. Where it ends is at the edge of the petri dish in a massive population crash as happens in every case with other forms of life we were supposed to have transcended:
it is terrible to suppose that we could get so many other things right and get this one wrong. To have the imagination to see our potential end, but not have the imagination to avoid it. To send humankind to the moon but fail to pay attention to the earth. To have the potential but to be unable to use it — to be, in the end, no different from the protozoa in the petri dish. For all our speed and voraciousness, our changeable sparkle and ash, we would be, at last count, not an especially interesting species.
For an unforgettable take on the journey there, Children of Men is an essential guide. In the film the existential threat posed by resource limits materialises suddenly through the conceit of an unspecified ailment that renders all humanity infertile.
An alternative possibility is imaginable if we accept we face civilisational threat from global challenges over the coming decades from climate change and resource depletion. In this scenario, we act collectively to address the pressure we have created on the global planetary system through our activity during the Anthropocene. The White Knight of technology plays a central role as saviour. A deus ex machina improbably rescuing the planet from the jaws of disaster just like the inevitable Hollywood movie. In order to do so, Accelerationism will find that instead of unhitching itself from human concerns, its future and ours will be increasingly preoccupied by four mega problems that affect our collective survival. In the best case scenario we need manifold White Knights capable of fighting each of these new four horsemen:
Heat reduction - the increasingly desperate efforts used to cool the earth.
Direct Carbon capture - extracting carbon we have pumped into the air and sea
Mass scale renewable energy - ultimately through small scale nuclear fusion
Synthetic food production - feeding the world when agriculture collapses
Even if we “solve” these problem it will take decades to unwind our climate debt. A predicted average rise in global temperature of 2˚C by the end of the century simply doesn’t register with a lot of people. It seems puny, far away and incapable of making much difference. At least that seems to be the only rational explanation why so many are indifferent when an overwhelming weight of evidence suggests the climate models are converging to actuality and are now really accurate in their predictive capability. This is a crisis of communication not science:
a new evaluation of global climate models used to project Earth’s future global average surface temperatures over the past half-century answers that question: most of the models have been quite accurate.
There is one thing we can confidently say will accelerate over the coming decades, namely global heating. A climate model simulation made for the United Nations' IPCC once seen cannot be ignored. Immeasurable tragedy laid out in swirling red and orange, the colours of fire. Adopt the brace position. Earth is going to be hot by 2100 and much hotter than 2˚C in large parts of the world including Africa, Asia, America and Australia. With all that entails for life.
Accelerationism represents an implausible bet that the White Knight of technology will solve all these problems before they hit us big time years from now. There’s very little to suggest this will happen either in terms of the technology or political will. Instead, life in 2100 is almost certainly going to be inconceivable to anyone alive today. Most of humanity will be desperately working in some capacity on keeping our civilisation alive in one way or another. Some of what that will mean is explored in Elizabeth Kolbert’s recent book Under A White Sky - the Nature of the Future. There’s an enduring image of deboned carp patties being eaten on burnt alabaster under a sky blanched white through solar geo-engineering. And that is a best case. The mental health impact is likely to be immense. Those alive in 2100 will experience a yearning nostalgia for our period we cannot imagine. Humanity may be driven to mass insanity just trying to exist.
Or perhaps we will end up somewhere in between the two ends of a broad spectrum between Accelerationists and Resistors with some elements of both scenarios playing out in parallel. Wherever that ends up being, a key message is that human life a few generations from now will not be like the present with more tech. It will be profoundly and frighteningly more precarious from an environmental perspective. We face the inevitability of mass extinction of species and and existential fight for survival on a degraded planet with a CO2 problem. The following post will examine how we got here and why we will not be able to escape our manifest destiny over the coming decades as we dig in for a desperate fight for survival.