The Case Against Accelerationism

On coming back from the brink (or not)

One of my favourite photos of Jim Simons. Click the image for source link (WSJ).

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Americans recently went to the polls and elected their 47th president. Time will tell how this administration fares - the history books will inevitably be written - but first time must pass. Let us not forget, highly contested elections are the envy of the world.

As was attributed to Lincoln - “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.”

In some way this is why I recently argued that, given enough time, the only relevant reading genre is biography.

What happened - how it all went down - that’s the most interesting thing, isn’t it? It’s likely baked into human nature, to some degree. We all feel like we’re on the Heroes Journey, and we’re naturally curious how that journey ends. How it all turns out.

After thousands of biographical pages you realize that there is a way things go. There are patterns. A process. And if there wasn’t a process, there ought to have been a process.

Things happen. You go out into the world and act. There are things you have to figure out and you make decisions of consequence. You build relationships and you nurture those relationships over time. Nothing meaningful gets done in a vacuum. You earn insights, notice inflection points - changes over time - and you stack what you’ve learned on top of a solid foundation.

“…learn first how to lay bricks then how to build…” - Nietzsche

Your actions, over time, lead to decisive moments - turning points, where the paths diverge and everything changes. Patterns.

Jim Simons is among pattern-finding-royalty, in so much as that exists. He’s a legendary investor, by way of “…mathematics, common sense, and good luck.”

Jim died in May of this year, but not before offering his principles for life:

1. Be guided by beauty - there is great joy in doing things right.

2. Surround yourself with the smartest, best people you can possibly have, and let them get on with it.

3. Do something that you can uniquely do.

4. Don’t give up easily - great work takes the time it takes.

5. Hope for good luck (…”that’s the most important principle.”)

You’ll notice that time is a central ingredient in Jim’s theory of why it happened, how it happened. Time only moves one way and we are inextricably linked to the times we’re in - there’s no escaping that. Great work takes good luck, consistency, attention, common sense, and a long time.

I recently came across a Substack piece that tries to connect our recent history to the current state of things, in an effort to create principles we can all agree on. It has been - to an alarming degree - on my mind since its publication. It’s the kind of piece that becomes hard to unsee. It just won’t let go.

Let me explain the level of depravity here. I encountered it for the first time, and read it over long espresso at my local (50 second pull). I was hooked. It was convincing. I printed it. Scribbled marginalia all over the bloody thing. Read it a second time. I shared it with my most enjoyable group chat. I read it again. The hard copy. I bought a file folder at the dollar store so I can keep it - un-wrinkled - in my backpack. I don’t know if Substack support has the kind of services I clearly need.

The piece in question - and the one you’re about to read - includes an exploration of time, a Chinese intellectual, a Russian dissident, TikTok, and the idea of accelerationism.

I can hear you now, begging - in the name of whatever you find Holy - to keep this one to less than 3,000 words. Unlikely.

Enjoy the companion track below, and thank you for reading.

“…Human nature is stronger than any individual, than any institution or technological invention….Ignore the laws at your own peril. Refusing to come to terms with human nature simply means that you are dooming yourself to patterns beyond your control and to feelings of confusion and helplessness.” - Robert Greene

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TL;DR: Humans make things. We can’t stop. Often we don't know why beyond the obvious - ‘Because we can.’ The question we’re being forced to answer now is - Does anybody actually want this?

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I. New Time, Work, & Information

Slow discipline.

Those two words, in that order, bubbled up in my brain yesterday. I was being told - nay, reminded - that consistency and attention are rare in our time. They have become the attributes that might set you apart.

Those able to stay healthy, enthusiastic, consistent, and focused on the job to be done, will be those who excel in the 21st-century. Not an easy feat, to be sure.

Slow discipline readjusts our expectations and relationship to time. Great work takes the time it takes. It’s the Stewart Brand adage - that any project worth doing takes five years of focused effort - minimum. It’s simple - without the blessing of time, we don’t know what the work is yet. What it will actually be. That will reveal itself - but only through time. (I’m entering year 3 of our current project and we’re only scratching the surface of good work).

Time - at least our perception of it - is accelerating at a wildly unreasonable rate and so we’re presented with a problem: How do we stay consistent and focused, when the temptations of acceleration and distraction have never been greater?

In the work world, what I’ve come to see as new time drives divisions between groups that are going to be a challenge to overcome. There are folks who work with their hands, on the physical world, every day. There are those who go beeboopbeeboop on computers all day - largely at home and alone. And there is an ever growing administrative state that many perceive as slow, bureaucratic, and exclusive. The first is fixed, the second is fast, and the third is fucked. (Sorry - I couldn’t resist the alliteration opportunity that clearly presented itself).

What we really want is to work on long-term things with long-term people. We want to work on things that take a long time and require us to build relationships that we nurture and manage daily. That’s as good as it gets. That’s human.

And so it is that we all instinctively feel the pull back to deep time. Where 5 years becomes the minimum, instead of 5 days, 5 minutes, or even 5 seconds, as on TikTok.

Don’t rush. Settle into the project. It takes the time it takes.

In the information space there is the ever-present question of how much information we should, and shouldn’t, take in.

As humans we’re programmed to constantly take in information from the environment and then go do something about it. When information intake is constant, it’s hard to know what to do, and so we’re likely pushed into 1 of 3 lanes - none of which are ultimately good for us or our work:

1. We train ourselves to ignore it (not good)

2. We get overwhelmed (not good)

3. We get distracted (not good)

You can see the obvious problem here - there is an infinite amount of information at our fingertips, for free, at all times. It’s drip-drip data torture. It’s less 1984, more Brave New World.

Unsurprisingly, information has been - and is being - used by our perceived (and sometimes real) adversaries to affect us in certain ways, at specific times, for specific reasons.

II. Bezmenov & The Progrum

There’s more to be said about information - the crux of our modern time problem.

We’re all seemingly programmed by nature to take in information, and to use our judgement to take action on the information presented.

“The survival of our earliest ancestors depended on their ability to communicate with one another well before the invention of language. They evolved new and complex emotions—joy, shame, gratitude, jealousy, resentment, et cetera. The signs of these emotions could be read immediately on their faces, communicating their moods quickly and effectively.” - Robert Greene

Some of us gravitate toward stories and fiction. This seems natural - echoes of when we sat in small groups around the fire, under the stars. Others park themselves in front of a television screen watching ad-supported cable news.

To some, it’s 1984. To others, A Brave New World. To others still, it’s a combination of 1984, A Brave New World, and Ready Player One all rolled in to one modern misery soup. I tend to be more optimistic than all that, but I can’t help wonder if we’ll need to bottom out before we rise. If we might need to get sick, before we get better. If that’s already happening - or has already happened - and we’re just waiting to see what it looks like. This would not be rare in history.

In my last essay I wrote about the agreements we make and why they are essential to a consistent and coherent cultural story. Culture, to me, is simply the sum-total of the agreements we make to one another and if those agreements suddenly collapse, it’s not clear to me what happens.

What happens when those agreements become impossible beyond a very small group of committed friends? What if there is no municipal, provincial, national, or international story? What if there is no consensus, on anything, anywhere? Has it always been this way - or is there something about our times that makes this a greater challenge than we’ve faced before? We all want to feel like we live in exciting times, but we can’t forget our long history.

There are two cases being presented and explored right now. The first is the case for a series of deliberate actions, taken by some nefarious group somewhere, that wants to harm us, divide us, and demoralize us. The ever-present and scary “they” that no one can seem to identify. The second, is the Brave New World case. That we are our own worst enemies and our biology is exactly at odds with our technology. We can’t help but want it, even if wanting it is destroying us.

Yuri Bezmenov was KGB - a Russian defector - who presented the West with the case for the former. That our lack of social cohesion - our inability to agree on much of anything beyond a very small group - is in some ways the result of deliberate action, taken by those who leverage(d) the new and amazing power of information technology.

Note: I have no idea who runs this YouTube channel and I’m certain they don’t own the original video here - but it had the clip I wanted pre-programmed and ready.

For our purposes here, the first 5 minutes is probably the most relevant.

The slow process of what Bezmenov calls ideological subversion or demoralization clearly hinges on the ideas of time and information. It’s a process, over time, of changing the perception of reality.

“Despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions.” - Bezmenov

In other words, if this process takes hold, you can give someone all the information you’d like, without ever changing their mind. Sound familiar?

In an environment of ideological subversion and demoralization, talking points that guarantee you likes on social media - “You’re not entitled to your own facts” - for example, become useless in the real world. Groups of people can, in every sense of the phrase, live in entirely different realities.

We’ll circle back to the point and what’s to be done about all of this in the last section.

III. Wang Huning, TikTok, & Accelerationism

Back to the Substack piece that just won’t let go, and to the other side of the coin. The essay that still lives in the furthest reaches of my leather book-bag, protected by a sheath of parchment that I paid a cool $1.05 for.

It was written by the wonderfully thoughtful Gurwinder Bhogal, and it presents the other side of our equation - from the perspective of one of modern China’s most cherished intellectuals.

TikTok is a Time Bomb

The latter case for what’s going on at the moment is, at its core, that our biology is directly at odds with our technology. That we can't help but want what we want, and what we want seems to be killing us. That there isn’t a nefarious group of people deliberately distracting and demoralizing us - that we’re doing a perfectly good job of that all on our own thank you very much.

“Advances in the understanding of positive reinforcement, driven mostly by people trying to get us to click on links, have now made it possible to consistently give people on the other side of the world dopamine hits at scale.

As such, pleasure is now a weapon; a way to incapacitate an enemy as surely as does pain. And the first pleasure-weapon of mass destruction may just be a little app on your phone called TikTok.” - Bhogal

The essence of why this seems to be particularly bad in the United States of America was captured in a book, titled (succinctly) America Against America, by a man named Wang Huning.

Many here won’t know the name. Wang is member #4 of China’s ‘Standing Committee’ - 7 men who hold the social, political, and economic purse strings of the country. As much as we in the West like to believe that everything in China is decided by one man, the Chinese themselves have consistently been reminding us that this is simply not reality.

Wang is China’s most beloved modern ideological theorist who “…advised China’s former leaders Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, and now…advises Xi Jinping, authoring many of his policies. In China he is called “guoshi” (国师: literally, “teacher of the nation”).”

For the West to truly understand what Wang thinks isn’t easy - he doesn’t do press, and he doesn’t speak English, but he has written several books, the most fascinating of which came as the result of a tour of America in 1988. He was invited by the Americans to tour the US for six months to get a better understanding of how the United States operates. An immersion of people and place that we should all be willing to do, if given the chance.

We can assume the Americans did this with the hopes of strengthening relations between the two nations. It’s not hard to imagine Wang touring the Ivey haunts of Boston, New Jersey, and Philadelphia - led by all too eager tour guides, graduate students, and elected officials.

“He recorded his findings in the 1991 book, America Against America, which has since become a key CCP text for understanding the US.”

The first American officials to read the text likely didn’t make it past the Executive Summary. I’m inclined to quote Gurwinder directly here because it’s written almost perfectly:

“The premise of the book is simple: the US is a paradox composed of contradictions: its two primary values—freedom and equality—are mutually exclusive. It has many different cultures, and therefore no overall culture. And its market-driven society has given it economic riches but spiritual poverty.

For Wang, the US’s contradictions stem from one source: nihilism. The country has become severed from its traditions and is so individualistic it can’t make up its mind what it as a nation believes. Without an overarching culture maintaining its values, the government’s regulatory powers are weak, easily corrupted by lobbying or paralyzed by partisan bickering. As such, the nation’s progress is directed mostly by blind market forces; it obeys not a single command but a cacophony of three hundred million demands that lead it everywhere and nowhere.

In Wang’s view, the lack of a unifying culture puts a hard limit on the US’s progress. The country is constantly producing wondrous new technologies, but these technologies have no guiding purpose other than their own proliferation.”

Wang’s theory of runaway American commercialism was later dubbed accelerationism, by an out-there British writer, Nick Land who, interestingly, later moved to China to write for state media.

Accelerationism argues that, if the whole point of creating technology is making more of it, the future is a fait-accompli. The system can’t be stopped. There is too much momentum. If the whole point of a system is giving people what they want, and what it turns out they want is reality TV, endless sugar, internet porn, and TikTok, how could a society possibly survive?

In this case, Wang Huning believes, that the Yury Bezmenov idea of intentional ideological subversion is unnecessary. When accelerationism takes hold in a commercially driven Western democracy, all there is to do is wait. Just give them what they want!

And so, some would argue, we get TikTok.

“Over the past century the market has taken us toward ever shorter-form entertainment, from cinema in the early 1900s, to TV mid-century, to minutes-long YouTube videos, to seconds-long TikTok clips. With TikTok the delay between desire and gratification is almost instant; there’s no longer any patience or effort needed to obtain the reward, so our mental faculties fall into disuse and disrepair.

And this is why TikTok could prove such a devastating geopolitical weapon. Slowly but steadily it could turn the West’s youth—its future—into perpetually distracted dopamine junkies ill-equipped to maintain the civilization built by their ancestors.”

…The problem, therefore, is not China, but us. America Against America. If TikTok is not a murder weapon, then it’s a suicide weapon.”

IV. The Case Against Accelerationism

So what’s to be done about all of this?

If there is intentional ideological subversion on one side, and our own desires are killing us on the other, how do we defend ourselves?

On one side, some will suggest legislation. Many of you will know I don’t personally believe that you can legislate social change effectively, long-term. It seems we run the risk of masking any actual underlying societal change with a set of arbitrary laws and regulations that folks are forced to cooperate with. Laws are not nearly enough to hold a culture together. It’s like masking productivity stagnation with population gain - eventually the foundation cracks and you get things like a housing or healthcare crisis. You need both.

On the other, an extreme personal discipline that gets more difficult by the day. Fascinatingly, a call for extreme ownership is the last thing any of us want to hear. We can’t imagine that we are to blame - that we could change right now if we so choose. We want to blame them. Who is them exactly? I’m never quite sure because they rarely seem to be identified.

There’s also a practical issue here. How many of us are actually going to commit to deleting the apps, in favour of outdoor exercise and intentional face-to-face relationship? The dopamine addictions have already set their claws - especially if we’ve allowed this to happen to our children, at an age where they are utterly helpless against so much stimulation.

I can’t help but think that an extreme personal discipline, on the foundation of meaningful work and meaningful relationships, is the only thing strong enough to break the ties that bind. It’s the only sustainable path forward. The system will not change. It seems to me that some sort of epiphany arises if we sit for a moment in silence and ask ourselves - does anybody actually want this?

We can return to a more human way of being. We can adopt technology and make new technology in a thoughtful way that serves us. We can wake up everyday, work a meaningful process, and exercise a personal discipline that serves us and serves our communities.

Onward.

Next time, testing a new definition of economic development and introducing an additional Newsletter.

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See you on the path.

-MG