[D66] accelerationism and the politics of the internet

[Nord]

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/debate-is-idiot-distraction-accelerationism-and-the-politics-of-the-internet/


    “debate is idiot distraction”: accelerationism and the politics of
    the internet

By Eugene Brennan.


Robert McChesney,/Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the 
Internet Against Democracy 
<http://thenewpress.com/index.php?option=com_title&task=view_title&metaproductid=1878>/, 
The New Press, 2013

The myths of libertarian competition and innovation espoused by 
defenders of neo-liberalism are the same myths which ‘celebrants’ of the 
internet have fallen prey to. In the nineties these ‘celebrants’ 
outweighed those Robert McChesney refers to as ‘skeptics’.  Theoretical 
and journalistic writing, intoxicated by the advances of the net, was by 
no means limited to the starry-eyed optimism of the likes 
of/Wired/magazine in California. The Internet and new technological 
changes were also a source of fascination from the very different 
perspective of the nihilistic libidinal economy of the Cybernetic 
Culture Research Unit (CCRU) at Warwick University. Sickened by the 
moralising tendencies of a Left content with identity politics, their 
controversial leader Nick Land searched for a theoretical praxis based 
on a negation of identity, a post-human ‘machinic praxis’. This led him 
to embrace the de-subjectiying qualities of neo-liberalism, envisioning 
capitalist speed as a generator of post-human technological revolution. 
The CCRU’s fusion of disparate elements included texts by Deleuze and 
Guattari , cyberpunk and science fiction references, films such as Blade 
Runner and Apocalypse Now, and jungle and rave music. The texts are 
saturated with a discourse on immersion and imminence, always oriented 
towards an experience of the Outside and a celebration of post-human 
possibilities.  If for Land and the CCRU, imminent human extinction was 
accessible on the dance floor, network theory and the development of the 
internet also pointed to exhilarating trajectories towards the Outside.

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