Posts ⁂ The Postmodern Terminal >_
Six terms defined properly, from deterritorialization and real subsumption to hyperstition and the fork between repurposing the machines and unleashing them.
In a 2014 seminar Nick Land explains acceleration through a novel rather than a formula. The moon breaks into seven pieces; two collide; every collision makes more pieces, and more pieces mean more collisions. Acceleration is not fast. It is self-feeding. Land borrows Ray Kurzweil's definition: any process where the more it happens, the more it happens. Not a car, a snowball. I will argue that this vocabulary describes capitalism's own advertising copy, and I will show it by defining the terms and letting Benjamin Noys turn them over.
Start with deterritorialization, whose weight Land states: "Deterritorialization is the only thing accelerationism has ever really talked about." Capitalism rips things loose from the meanings that held them in place, then reattaches them somewhere it can charge you. Pull loose, sell the landing spot. Your spare bedroom used to be a bedroom. Then it became a listing, a nightly rate, a star rating. The room did not move; its meaning did.
Deleuze and Guattari described that process in 1972, in the passage every later accelerationist returns to: "Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to 'accelerate the process,' as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet." In context it is not a slogan but a strategic question. If capitalism keeps producing the conditions that could unmake it, do you fight the machine or push it toward its own ending?
Next, real subsumption. A taxi firm renting out cars hires an existing way of working. An app that times your route, picks your path, and rates you after every ride rebuilds the job so it can only be done the company's way. Work does not get outsourced; it gets remade from the inside.
Now the largest concept here. At full strength, the claim holds that the market was a kind of artificial intelligence before anyone built a computer. Park Macdougald, writing on Land, calls the market a form of "artificial superintelligence," "long before the computer is even invented." Not a tool humans operate; a thing running its own logic, using humans as parts. Land says it without flinching: "Mankind is its temporary host, not its master."
Noys's reply is the sharpest knife in the tradition, and I take it as mine: "the accelerationists take as fact capitalism's fundamental fantasy of self-engendering production. They are an archetypal instance of the fetishists of capital." Capital-as-alien-machine is capitalism's advertising, mistaken for physics. Believe it, and no human decision-maker remains to blame.
Which brings us to hyperstition, the CCRU's word for beliefs that make themselves true by being believed hard. A market bubble qualifies: believing an asset will rise makes it rise, until it does not. In 2022 a small group on Twitter began calling itself "effective accelerationists" and behaved as though the movement already had followers, arguments, a history. Within a year it did. An essay like this one runs a small version of the same trick; I do it anyway, because the alternative leaves these words to the people already using them near power. Noys names a second unease: acceleration "breeds passivity before the productive forces." If the machine drives, you are a passenger, and passengers do not organize.
Two terms left. Folk politics is Srnicek and Williams's name for a left that trusts only the local, direct action and horizontal organizing, which they say cannot scale to a planetary problem. The term is a polemic; the people it describes did not pick it. Exit versus voice: argue with the institution, or leave and build another. Curtis Yarvin, who writes as Mencius Moldbug, has nearly a whole program in that one word.
Which leaves the fork the tradition sits on: repurposing versus unleashing. Take the machines over and run them toward different ends, or take the brakes off and let capital finish. Mark Fisher built the image out of two films. Terminator: the machine as hostile alien will, coming for you. Avatar: technology as the only road to an untouched nature it already destroyed. Repurpose the machine, or become it. Fisher knew the cost of the second from the inside, telling an audience in 2011 that this is "the banality of the Inferno, which we're in actually." Both roads agree the machines are the terrain; they disagree about who drives.
The Postmodern Terminal >_