[D66] Acceleratie-idiotie

[J.N.]

Wat te doen? Vraag het de luddieten...

http://www.publicbooks.org/nonfiction/on-accelerationism


On Accelerationism
Fred Turner

September 1, 2016 — What is to be done? In 1901, when Lenin posed this
now-canonical question, the answer was a communist revolution. Today, 25
years since the Internet went public, the answer has come to seem to
many on the left to be a technological one. In the 1990s, it was
right-wing libertarians such as John Perry Barlow who claimed to know
what to do with the information system. In the future, they wrote, we
would leave our bodies behind and dive headlong into a glorious pool of
universal mind called Cyberspace. In the early 2000s, the builders of
social media, some of whom subscribed to the tech-left ideals of open
source software and copyleft reproduction rights, sold the public a new
utopia. But instead of the world of technology-enabled interpersonal
intimacy they promised, social media have become a series of
commercially sponsored stages on which to preen for selfies and spin off
data to be mined by states and corporations. During the Arab Spring
uprisings of 2011, pundits on the right and the left even declared that
cell phones and the Internet were becoming tools of political
revolution. Yet today the authoritarian leaders of Egypt are if anything
more entrenched than their predecessors were.

In their new book, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World
without Work, based on their widely circulated 2013 “Manifesto for an
Accelerationist Politics,” British cultural theorists Nick Srnicek and
Alex Williams argue that all of this needs to change. At a time when the
future seems to belong to Chicago-school economists and the Internet to
Google and the NSA, Srnicek and Williams have courageously drafted a
call to re-imagine left politics from top to bottom. Nonetheless, the
alternative vision of the left they propose in fact owes a great deal to
the neoliberal imagination it aims to challenge. Srnicek and Williams
believe that emerging technologies have laid the foundation for the kind
of egalitarian social world once promised by Lenin himself. To bring
that world into being, they argue, we need not to resist but to
accelerate the development of new technologies and the spread of
capitalism. And they are not alone. In the last two years, a vigorous
debate has bubbled up in England, where Srnicek and Williams live, and
spilled over into the tech-savvy enclaves of the United States. To visit
that debate may be to catch a glimpse of a new New Left emerging—or, in
the view of some of the movement’s more strident critics, the final
triumph of techno-libertarianism.


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