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If accelerationism has a key idea, it is that it is either impossible or undesirable to resist or negate the development of the commodity economy coupled with technology. Rather, it has to be pushed harder and faster, that it has to change more rather than less. It is an idea, a feeling, an orientation…
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“After me, the deluge,” declared King Louis XV, at what was almost but not quite the high water mark of Absolutism. These days one might say, after capitalism, the derivative. The late work of Randy Martin takes up the startling premise that the commodity form has mutated into something else. Knowledge LTD: Towards a Social…
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“Sensory language leaves us with no habit for lying. We are hostile aliens, immune from dying.” – The Spaceape If accelerationism has a key idea, it is that it is either impossible or undesirable to resist or negate the development of the commodity economy coupled with technology. Rather, it has to be pushed harder and…
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Like Moliere’s Monsieur Jourdain, who was so surprised to learn that all these years he has been speaking prose, people are often shocked to learn that they think in concepts. It’s not just us theorists who make up funny meanings for funny words. Take the word individual. It seems ordinary enough. Only, why is it…
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There was once a fantasy, shared by left and right alike, that the states of the under-developed world could come, whether by leaps or by steps, to approximate those of the so-called developed world, as if they represented some kind of historical destiny. This idea belongs to what one might call an imaginary, or what…
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When my daughter was little, we played a game on the way to her preschool called Count the Dog Poo. It was a game about counting, as you would play with any child, but also a game for a little New Yorker, to teach her to watch where she steps. Living in New York, pretty…
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“Humanity does not exist under the sign of the divine… but of the monstrous.” — Paul B. Préciado “Read, this!,” he said, thrusting a soiled photocopy of a typescript into my hands. “It will change your life!” Then he disappeared back into the public toilet he was cruising. This was my introduction to the works…
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1. Old versus Young Marx I am a recovering Althusserian. For decades now I have been Althusser-free, for the most part, but we all have our lapses. The first step to becoming a recovering Althusserian is to recognize that you have no control and are unconsciously always a little bit Althusserian whether you want to…
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We are all cyborgs now. To the point where this reality no longer appears at all striking. As so perfectly pictured in Alex Rivera’s film Sleepdealer (2008), we are biological machines strapped to information machines which together function as war machines. It is remarkable how much of our cyborg existence Donna Haraway anticipated. In this…
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This civilization is already over, and everyone knows it. We’re in a sort of terminal spiral of thanaticism. The paths to another form of life seem blocked, so it seems there’s nothing for it but to double down and bet all the chips on the house that kills us. But there might be something to…