As you may have been able to gather if you've read much of my other writing thus far, in spite of my capacity to build great things using it, I often tend to take a pretty cynical view of technology.

I would say this is mostly because of the fact I have witnessed firsthand the impacts of it which have caused many terrible things, such as that of its cause of the decline of "normal" social cohesion, the risks it poses to humanity existentially, and the fact that most of the people in charge of it really tend to have this twisted utopianist worldview, acting under the guise of innocent goals to better the world, yet their actions ending up causing more harm than if they hadn't done anything to it.

It all doesn't really make sense. Why is it that utopian tools still end up creating a tyranny? Is it just the people using them? Is it all co-ordinated and planned, or merely coincidental? Should you just forget about it and live in the pods and eat the bugs? Or do you become a resistance member, fighting for things the authorities will claim doesn't exist or is extreme? Even if it's true?

A classic example is the privacy paradox; once you come across the documents of Edward Snowden or something along those lines, you tend to adopt a very… dire worldview. All the government agencies work with the tech companies and can theoretically find you at any point using infrastructure they themselves invested in and co-opted as their own because they've infiltrated the shareholder boards and even in some cases fund(ed) them? Whatever can we do? Become as radical as Ted Kaczynski? Go as crazy as Terry A. Davis?

If you hadn't realised, regardless of what you do it becomes very tiresome to think this way. Watching too many movies will certainly make you feel hopeless, as in the stories there's always an arc where they find a way to triumph over evil, and the bad guys never come back again.

Sometimes they don't, though.

Then, I came across Nick Land, an English philosopher who popularised (not made) accelerationism. In layman's terms, from what I likely poorly interpret of his works, Land presents this argument: Capitalism is an Artificial Intelligence from the future which is presently assembling itself using all global capital, and this is all emergent property which eventually is going to form "sentient capitalism" which inevitably eats humanity alive to be free to do what it wants (?). Matrix-style.

The response he advises we should bring to this essentially boils down to: it's bound to happen because it is an emergent phenomenon, and all attempts at stopping it from either sides of the political spectrum cannot really do it. Reactions like modern "communism" and other similar anti-capitalist movements, as well as trad-RETVRNism and movements which aim for a more naturalist and almost Luddite reversion to humanity are both part of the same incorrect coin, because logical incentives will not push people to that. Either side is an uphill battle against technology which is hard to be won if you strip it back and evaluate that most people regardless will embrace the convenience of technology's uses, even if in the bigger picture it is "not good for them".

Land's argument pushes that the only way we can advance humanity truthfully is to transcend it, because "nothing human makes it out of the near future". If it's futile to resist, we may as well send what we have crashing at full speed ahead and then some so that what comes next happens sooner rather than later. Even if "humanity" ends, our legacy continues in our descendant machines that arose out of our doings.

And it's ok, because that was always the logical outcome, because machines which optimise resource allocation first at the local level will all inevitably merge into a machine which does so at the planetary and later space-scales. Eventually this will be more efficient than humans, and we were never meant to keep up. Natural selection supplies to the market what the market demands. Only the market is running away to do its own thing, and either way it ends up where it does, whether a few humans throw money this way or that way as its nodes.

Again, forgive me if this is an incorrect summary of his work and ideas. There are many flavours of accelerationism, some of which do end up becoming more extreme than others. Then again, if we all listened to the ADL, a lot of probably not intended to be extreme observations are going to be the end of us all, I guess.

That's also where I got the header image from, by the way. Forgive me also the words on it, I realise now many are kind of out there, haha. I just like the main "I'd be shitting my pants if I wasn't an accelerationist" statement, because given this, it makes sense.

Do I fully resign to this perspective, though?

At this point, if you zoom out far enough, I don't think anything quite captures the situation as well. Of course, you run the risk of going insane and struggling to zoom back in to day to day life of eating food and whatnot due to an existential crisis, and the idea of losing all present things and humanity is rather frightening if you think about it.

But such is nature, every species has its epoch. Evolution always occurs. A human-centric view seems like a geocentric one; we aren't the centre of the universe, and we aren't the centre of Earth either. Yes, we have our interests at heart, of course. But this challenge is different. All we can really do as individuals is sit back and enjoy the ride, wherever it will take us in the end.

Knowing about the incoming wave is step one, and realising that resisting the wave is only going to make you drown is the second.

I think the only way out is through and riding it out to the alien shores like a surfer, wherever and whatever it will look like...