Posts ⁂ The Postmodern Terminal >_
An antiracist and decolonial analysis of accelerationist theory, running from the slave ship Zong through Yuk Hui's cosmotechnics to the mine under every clean interface.
In 1781 the crew of the slave ship Zong threw more than a hundred and thirty people into the Atlantic and filed an insurance claim. Cargo lost at sea paid out; cargo dead of illness did not. That is not a metaphor for a market treating people as things. It is a market treating people as things, with paperwork, two centuries before anyone wrote about capital as alien intelligence. I argue that accelerationism cannot survive its own audit unchanged, by reading it through three bodies it leaves out: the commodified, the colonized, and the ground.
The plantation ran like engineering: labor timed by the clock rather than the season, workers sorted into quotas, people tracked and insured like freight because that is what the law made them. Capitalism's speed technology, the ledger, the stopwatch, the futures contract, got tested on bodies first. Aria Dean puts it in a line: capital was kick-started by the rape of the African continent. Accelerationism, she writes, is "always already out of gas to the extent that it fails to recognize what started it rolling."
Now read three accelerationist manifestos back to back and watch the word doing the heaviest lifting while never getting defined. "We" invent the machines, seize the infrastructure, become gods. Unmarked, in the pattern of these texts, tends to mean white, male, and sitting in a wealthy country, never the body doing the mining or the laundry.
Yuk Hui answers a related assumption, that there is one timeline of technology and everyone is ahead on it or behind. Nick Land's line about neo-China arriving from the future assumes exactly that. Hui answers with two myths: Prometheus steals fire from the gods, technology as a crime you pay for, while in an older Chinese story the sages hand tools to people, technology as a gift given out of care. Neither is the master copy the other is catching up to. Hui calls the plural version cosmotechnics, technologies each grown from a cosmovision of how people, tools, and the universe fit together. Apply one culture's story to the planet and you get, in his words, "a more subtle form of colonialism."
Franco Berardi aims at the nervous system instead of the map. Acceleration happens to bodies before it shows up on a graph, and bodies have a ceiling. Attention takes time to focus and time to release, and it "cannot be infinitely accelerated"; desire "cannot be accelerated beyond the point of spasm." Panic and depression are not side effects of a fast economy on his account. They are what the collision feels like from inside, where acceleration destroys "any possible form of autonomous subjectivation."
Another body goes missing from every full-automation pitch. Robots build, move, and grow things; almost nobody asks who feeds the people running the robots, or sits up with a sick kid so somebody else makes the shift. That work has a name, social reproduction, and it has fallen mostly to women for as long as there has been a wage to organize a household around. A faster factory does nothing for it.
The third body is the ground. Every promise here runs on hardware, and hardware runs on lithium, cobalt, copper, and water, mined disproportionately in the global South. Call it extractivism: the mine under every clean interface. Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto runs about five thousand two hundred words, says "we believe" more than a hundred times, and never says "climate change." In a document that long, the omission took an active choice.
An audit has to survive being pointed at itself. Benjamin Noys calls contemporary accelerationism "a postgraduate disorder," less an insult than a demographic profile, and says the desire for it obscures "the material that you would have to work with." Berardi's own answer is mostly refusal, and refusal is cheaper for some than others; the people who can unplug are rarely the people standing in the mine. Ernst Bloch named the trap long before anyone coined the word: think purely economically alongside capital's injustices, then imagine a higher life afterward. Afterward is too late. The question is smaller and harder than accelerate or don't. Whose hand is on the throttle, and who pays for the fuel?
The Postmodern Terminal >_