This is part of a new series in which I am attempting to provide the e/acc movement with a more philosophical and historical foundation.

Short answer: no (in fact they’re antithetical), but without post-modernism there would be no e/acc.

So I was watching this debate between a bunch of cigarettes smoking philosophers from 1981 when post Post Modernism was just starting to turn from a real niche group into something a bit more mainstream. Back when postmodernism was cool.

This one professor, Gayatri Spivak (who now is a prof at Columbia and in this video is described as a deconstructionist, feminist, and marxist) expressed this idea of radical vulnerability, where all narratives are constructed, and that anytime that you take a narrative and you make it give it some conclusive end, whenever you say that you know something assuredly you’re probably wrong. She says that people make up narratives that’s natural but if you really want truth, you’ve got to accept that there is no truth, that everything is a lie, every end is in someway false, it leaves out some people and benefits others, and there’s not much you can do about it except smash down those false narratives.

It was nice to hear this form of thinking in its purest form, before it took on its more institutionalized, top-down form with banks and governments and militaries feeling a need to purge themselves of their constructed narratives around race and gender. In it’s original form, it actually makes some sense: we don’t know anything really for sure, all we do (and all we’ve ever done as a species) is create convenient models in our head of what reality is, but we never know all of it for sure (cause what would be the fun in that?). It’s a very Buddhist idea, this sort of positivist nihilism, the acceptance of the void.

But nothing lasts in its pure form and this framework was appropriated by various actors most notably it fused with Marxism to create neo-marxism whose proponents sought to deconstruct every narrative that oppressed the working class, women, certain minority races, any narrative (supposedly) constructed by the oppressor (capitalist, male, white, straight) class to oppress the oppressed. (sheesh that’s a lot of oppress’s).

Now 40 years later we’re seeing this philosophy’s most perverse form, its mirror reflection, but it’s a hall a mirrors. But I think this philosophy is really the source of a lot of the cynicism and a lot of the rampant questioning of everything, of everybody’s motives, what we know about everything, and everybody saying that no one knows anything about anything. It’s pretty amazing to see the roots of what the e/acc’s would call the doomer ideology in one kinda funky looking professor of English summarizing a school of thought from some Parisian intellectuals.

So now you can react to a video like this and say one of three things: 1) that’s pretty cool (and then you’re really behind the curve), 2) be a Jordan Peterson type person who says that this is stupidest, the most dangerous ideology that’s ever existed, or 3) something of the following…

In the long term, I believe this ideology has a certain utility as it serves as a means of clearing away all previous (now perhaps false) notions of the truth as well as our method for obtaining those truths. Its manifestation may even take on a physical form, where the physical reflections of our societal truths — the edifices, the monuments, the senate houses, etc. — are destroyed as well, most likely though some kind of war. This would chaotic, it is unsettling frightening destructive, it is the realization of the doomsday dreams that these boomers have been concocting for fifty years.

But the most useful aspect of a doomsday scenario is that it typically includes some form of divine judgement: individuals, social structures, nations/empires are judged by conflict, strife, pressures of all kinds and those that are (by providence and ingenuity) smiled upon endure and those that do not perish.

But it’s not zero-sum: more than anything such a “doomer’s day” through this ideological and later physical destruction creates a void — a void for meaning, structure, organization, method, truth — that must necessarily be rapidly (and often violently) filled. In that scenario the people who are most necessary are the builders, the constructors, the doers, the accelerators.

I see this on most of the vc, startup ecosystem podcasts that I listen to, where most founders have a similar chain of thought: ‘given that x is corrupt/broken, we are building y.’ Given that the financial system is corrupt → crypto, given that climate change is destroying our planet → electric cars, solar tech, nuclear fission…

I imagine I’m not the first person who has had this idea, but this in toto would would amount to a novel societal methodology of truth-getting: a newly constructed, distributed system of how to obtain a more pure (albeit still imperfect) truth of everything.

To make them more specific we can think about what’s happening in the science area where the old system was a bunch of papers, published by journals and it’s become somewhat corrupted. You have journals that won’t publish things that don’t follow either a scientific or in some cases political orthodoxy; you have all these journal articles not being read by a lot of people and so there’s not actually a lot of the cross pollination; there’s very little reproduceability in a lot of scientific studies. All of this is emblematic of a structure that is feeble and past its useful life.

The post modernist would say, ‘great mission accomplished. We’ve deconstructed this institution, shown it to be the corrupt mechanism of lies and oppression that it is, great job us.’ Or, you can respond with a more positivist, accelerationist approach: ‘let’s build something better.’

In the case of academic science, you could see the integration of digitized journals overseen by Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), offering a more democratic governance model. AI would be used to enhance the rigor and frequency of research replication. Quantum computing and advanced simulations promise to unlock new scientific discoveries. Moreover, improved communication networks and interconnected databases will facilitate better collaboration and integration of research, making the scientific process more networked and innovative.

We could apply this innovative mindset across every industry and academic field. For history (for instance), this would mean digitizing archives and employing AI to meticulously analyze every piece of information available, constructing detailed timelines and searchable databases. Picture historians equipped with VR glasses, simultaneously examining multiple documents with the help of AI, synthesizing this vast amount of data into coherent narratives. This method enables the creation of evidence-based histories at a pace ten times faster than before, without sacrificing accuracy. By cross-referencing with the work of others, it fosters a dynamic, competitive marketplace of ideas, propelling our understanding towards more accurate historical narratives.

What this would amount to across all of academia and all the various fields is something that seems farfetched and naive in our pessimistic times: massive new discoveries in academia, extreme productivity gains, hypercharging not just structuralism but the exponential creation of new structures and narratives — modernity on hyperdrive. In this way post-modernism will in fact not be ‘post’ at all, but will instead be remembered as an ideological cleanser that paved the way for the next era of modernity’s dominance.

So maybe those who embrace accelerationism shouldn't be too quick to dismiss the doomer. Just as the Jack Pine seedling requires a cleansing fire to clear the old forest's shadow, so too do we need the heat of pessimism and apocolyism to melt away our resinous barriers of comfort and complacency. It's through this fiery trial that the seeds of innovation and resilience can germinate, sprouting from the ashes to forge creations that may last for generations to come.

This is part of a new series in which I am attempting to provide the e/acc movement with a more philosophical and historical foundation.

Short answer: no (in fact they’re antithetical), but without post-modernism there would be no e/acc.

So I was watching this debate between a bunch of cigarettes smoking philosophers from 1981 when post Post Modernism was just starting to turn from a real niche group into something a bit more mainstream. Back when postmodernism was cool.

This one professor, Gayatri Spivak (who now is a prof at Columbia and in this video is described as a deconstructionist, feminist, and marxist) expressed this idea of radical vulnerability, where all narratives are constructed, and that anytime that you take a narrative and you make it give it some conclusive end, whenever you say that you know something assuredly you’re probably wrong. She says that people make up narratives that’s natural but if you really want truth, you’ve got to accept that there is no truth, that everything is a lie, every end is in someway false, it leaves out some people and benefits others, and there’s not much you can do about it except smash down those false narratives.

It was nice to hear this form of thinking in its purest form, before it took on its more institutionalized, top-down form with banks and governments and militaries feeling a need to purge themselves of their constructed narratives around race and gender. In it’s original form, it actually makes some sense: we don’t know anything really for sure, all we do (and all we’ve ever done as a species) is create convenient models in our head of what reality is, but we never know all of it for sure (cause what would be the fun in that?). It’s a very Buddhist idea, this sort of positivist nihilism, the acceptance of the void.

But nothing lasts in its pure form and this framework was appropriated by various actors most notably it fused with Marxism to create neo-marxism whose proponents sought to deconstruct every narrative that oppressed the working class, women, certain minority races, any narrative (supposedly) constructed by the oppressor (capitalist, male, white, straight) class to oppress the oppressed. (sheesh that’s a lot of oppress’s).

Now 40 years later we’re seeing this philosophy’s most perverse form, its mirror reflection, but it’s a hall a mirrors. But I think this philosophy is really the source of a lot of the cynicism and a lot of the rampant questioning of everything, of everybody’s motives, what we know about everything, and everybody saying that no one knows anything about anything. It’s pretty amazing to see the roots of what the e/acc’s would call the doomer ideology in one kinda funky looking professor of English summarizing a school of thought from some Parisian intellectuals.

So now you can react to a video like this and say one of three things: 1) that’s pretty cool (and then you’re really behind the curve), 2) be a Jordan Peterson type person who says that this is stupidest, the most dangerous ideology that’s ever existed, or 3) something of the following…

In the long term, I believe this ideology has a certain utility as it serves as a means of clearing away all previous (now perhaps false) notions of the truth as well as our method for obtaining those truths. Its manifestation may even take on a physical form, where the physical reflections of our societal truths — the edifices, the monuments, the senate houses, etc. — are destroyed as well, most likely though some kind of war. This would chaotic, it is unsettling frightening destructive, it is the realization of the doomsday dreams that these boomers have been concocting for fifty years.

But the most useful aspect of a doomsday scenario is that it typically includes some form of divine judgement: individuals, social structures, nations/empires are judged by conflict, strife, pressures of all kinds and those that are (by providence and ingenuity) smiled upon endure and those that do not perish.

But it’s not zero-sum: more than anything such a “doomer’s day” through this ideological and later physical destruction creates a void — a void for meaning, structure, organization, method, truth — that must necessarily be rapidly (and often violently) filled. In that scenario the people who are most necessary are the builders, the constructors, the doers, the accelerators.

I see this on most of the vc, startup ecosystem podcasts that I listen to, where most founders have a similar chain of thought: ‘given that x is corrupt/broken, we are building y.’ Given that the financial system is corrupt → crypto, given that climate change is destroying our planet → electric cars, solar tech, nuclear fission…

I imagine I’m not the first person who has had this idea, but this in toto would would amount to a novel societal methodology of truth-getting: a newly constructed, distributed system of how to obtain a more pure (albeit still imperfect) truth of everything.

To make them more specific we can think about what’s happening in the science area where the old system was a bunch of papers, published by journals and it’s become somewhat corrupted. You have journals that won’t publish things that don’t follow either a scientific or in some cases political orthodoxy; you have all these journal articles not being read by a lot of people and so there’s not actually a lot of the cross pollination; there’s very little reproduceability in a lot of scientific studies. All of this is emblematic of a structure that is feeble and past its useful life.

The post modernist would say, ‘great mission accomplished. We’ve deconstructed this institution, shown it to be the corrupt mechanism of lies and oppression that it is, great job us.’ Or, you can respond with a more positivist, accelerationist approach: ‘let’s build something better.’

In the case of academic science, you could see the integration of digitized journals overseen by Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), offering a more democratic governance model. AI would be used to enhance the rigor and frequency of research replication. Quantum computing and advanced simulations promise to unlock new scientific discoveries. Moreover, improved communication networks and interconnected databases will facilitate better collaboration and integration of research, making the scientific process more networked and innovative.

We could apply this innovative mindset across every industry and academic field. For history (for instance), this would mean digitizing archives and employing AI to meticulously analyze every piece of information available, constructing detailed timelines and searchable databases. Picture historians equipped with VR glasses, simultaneously examining multiple documents with the help of AI, synthesizing this vast amount of data into coherent narratives. This method enables the creation of evidence-based histories at a pace ten times faster than before, without sacrificing accuracy. By cross-referencing with the work of others, it fosters a dynamic, competitive marketplace of ideas, propelling our understanding towards more accurate historical narratives.

What this would amount to across all of academia and all the various fields is something that seems farfetched and naive in our pessimistic times: massive new discoveries in academia, extreme productivity gains, hypercharging not just structuralism but the exponential creation of new structures and narratives — modernity on hyperdrive. In this way post-modernism will in fact not be ‘post’ at all, but will instead be remembered as an ideological cleanser that paved the way for the next era of modernity’s dominance.

So maybe those who embrace accelerationism shouldn't be too quick to dismiss the doomer. Just as the Jack Pine seedling requires a cleansing fire to clear the old forest's shadow, so too do we need the heat of pessimism and apocolyism to melt away our resinous barriers of comfort and complacency. It's through this fiery trial that the seeds of innovation and resilience can germinate, sprouting from the ashes to forge creations that may last for generations to come.