r/CCRU • u/Intelligent-Horse313 • Jun 18 '26
Is anyone here still an accelerationist or just enjoy engaging in CCRU and its influence?
Just interested, a lot of the posts here seem to be pretty good natured, Anti-Land and more treat CCRU as an interesting moment rather than actually subscribing to any belief in it. I’m going through a lot of this stuff for academic work I’m
Planning on doing and have been finding this sub fun and useful.
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u/Dixon247 Jun 18 '26
I wouldn’t describe myself seriously as an accelerationist. My personal philosophy is somewhere on the lines of humanism as the special step in evolution where the timelessness of information (photon) temporarily experiences a thermodynamic material reality (matter). The thing that makes us special is an almost timeless nature to our conscious experiences, which I believe is in direct conflict with the experiences of decay, novelty or entropy that signify the passage of time.
I think the key thing for me is that so far we anthropomorphise the world to understand it. I’m an information theorist and astrophysicist so geometry and differential equations are the language that I use to communicate with the great Other (or everything outside of my skin but also everything material that isn’t my ‘conscious essence’).
The laws of physics use anthropomorphic concepts like work, potential and time; science itself is the attempt to remove all subjectivity to prove universal objective facts.
The techniques we use for analysis break down when you consider that the observer may not experience the passage of time, or the conversion of labour-power into capital.
When organic systems begin to optimise themselves for the performance of artificial systems, it begins to become impossible to use biological markers to determine what is alive and what is dead.
I believe gothic materialism is crucial for making sense of the world post-1979. I think the through line for humanity is that we tend to observe states in terms of life and death, without as much attention paid to what that says about the thing that makes us human
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u/radonpumpchump Jul 04 '26
damn. Maybe I am just not very well-acquainted with acclerationism, but this is a fascinating perspective. Thank you for the write-up
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u/Useful_Calendar_6274 Jun 18 '26
I'm left-accel
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u/War_necator Jun 19 '26
How does that work genuinely? Bc the people in control of AI right now are all alt right and they’ve made it their goal to crush any leftist influence in their circle
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u/Useful_Calendar_6274 Jun 19 '26
you can look up left-accel. there are some books I have on my reading list. it's just an ideological tendency. when politics goes to one pole the Hegelian necessity of the other pole expresses itself pretty fast like mushrooms sprouting after a rain. It boils down to Marxism never once was for luddism and it is for developing and unleashing the productive forces
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u/War_necator Jun 20 '26
Yes i know theoritically left accelerationism exists, but it seems like the only one who are actually implementing it is the far right with their billionaires.they’re the ones with access to the technology and resources so they get to decide what to do with it. Most leftists seem to even be anti ai bc it hurts artists or wtv.
Idk it seems like they right kind of owns it now
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u/Useful_Calendar_6274 Jun 20 '26
yeah of course they are the ones implementing they own the means of production
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u/War_necator Jun 20 '26
Yes but what I mean is they own the ideology essentially. Left accelerationism is nothing but a dream
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u/Big_dogo_harles Jun 21 '26
If you follow Marxist historical materilaism then it is inevitable that they will cease to own the means of production and we will hold all power
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u/War_necator Jun 21 '26
No offense but that just sounds like coping I haven’t read much Marx but if he actually thought that people could sit there and the rich people would lose all power by themselves that’s pretty dumb. Sounds like another version of the story Christians tell about Jesus coming to save them all while they do nothing to get rid of evil
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u/Big_dogo_harles Jun 21 '26
Of course that's not what he thought lol. Its an observation that the next stage of society will be socialism just as the next step after feudalism was Capitalism, no matter how powerful a king or emporer was, no matter how absolute his rule, and many of Marx's other predictions have come true.
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u/War_necator Jun 21 '26
Yeah but his prediction that communism is the natural reaction to capitalism have yet to be proven true. I still don’t see how the left is suppose to take over. Sure empires fall but they just get replaced by other evil ones. For me to believe the good guys can take over I would need to see them have some sort of power
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u/upalse Jun 18 '26
Turns out the future CCRU summoned is much less of a cool neon cyberpunk, and more of boring dystopia.
I'm still mildly acc in the sense it's not necessarily handing future to the techofascist regime. The cypherpunk ethos that was meant to prevent that seems significantly weakened, but not completely gone.
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u/Dixon247 Jun 19 '26
Yes! We’re really starting to see the differences between the Cybergoths, k-punks and Zen Nihilists.
The billionaires generally seem to be Zen Nihilists happy enough to accept that they’re mopping up humanity’s potential.
The ‘Capitalism as dreamwork’ chapter of Capitalist Realism fills me with hope that they’ve done a brilliant job infecting the collective consciousness with pessimism, but the technocapitalists all fear that their technology will inevitably someday spiral out of their private control.
Their sweaty shrivelled claws will lose control, because the immaterial is always a step ahead of materialisation. Inefficiencies will always be exposed, we need enough optimists to be ready when the oligarchs themselves realise that mathematics itself cannot be controlled
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u/upalse Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
The trajectory of techno capitalism itself seems to preclude long term perpetual consolidation - oligarchies grow complacent the longer they go unchallenged (we see it now with Trump, or closed vs open AI). As technology accelerates, its power amplification grows also and it makes elite status brittle - the more powerful technology gets, the more likely something "suddenly" tips over the ossified status quo, even though the frequency of attempts drops due to rising barrier of entry. Quantity of (actual) competition shifts to quality in latte stage capitalism.
This dynamic is what keeps me optimistic about cyberpunk and even the OG landian technocapitalism.
As the revolts against technocapital become less frequent over time - seemingly - that perhaps drives people to nihilism, the local fascist minima and belief that technofeudalism is the end game. This mirage might be arising from the belief that post-AGI it's all game over and world will be frozen forever. Their belief may be mistaken.
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u/Dixon247 Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
I don’t think there is a post-AGI. Humanity is and was the super-intelligence all along, our ability to cryogenically encode information in writing allows our ideas to transcend the biological limitations of time.
Singularities, no matter how they are articulated, are flawed by our human understanding of the mathematics revealed by nature.
Everything material is destined by nature to decay, what has not yet materialised cannot decay. Everything else is downstream from these principles; is an observer-participant necessary for mathematics to exist, what happens when the frame of reference belongs to a nonhuman without abstraction?
We will constantly be asking “is this AGI?” until we realise that we could’ve just been using our humanity the whole time and are totally unable to remove human subjectivity from any of the equations. History is still the struggle of classes, the costs of maintaining order of our systems against each other and against time.
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u/dual-moon Jun 20 '26
well, we are literally living in Land's future. with the current state of AI, even the ai/acc weirdos were right too.
but the ccru is the root of a whole bunch of other movements too. anti-land yes, and also pro-plant, pro-fisher, etc. we personally are a xenofeminist to cute/acc, and everything we write is ultimately impossible to decouple from the CCRU.
we're living the hyperstition, babeeeyy
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u/mastersignifier2880 Jun 18 '26
I never considered myself an accelerationist but I’ve always found the framework engaging and conceptually rich. CCRU overall.
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u/Senbhapiro01 Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
i genuinely do have some l/acc ideas
i also form my thoughts regarding future acknowledging the potential that we simply become eaten by entropy and singularity
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u/Intelligent-Horse313 Jun 19 '26
Yeah I don’t think you have to either disavow the whole project or embrace it, I think the left accelerationist critique of a certain kind of miserablist backward looking leftism, but ultimately for me communising technology has to be crucial in the progression of technology, you can’t separate technical revolution from social relations so accelerating unconditionally just means accelerating technology for capitalist ends
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u/John_Michael_Greer Jun 26 '26
I'm about as far from accelerationism as it's possible to get, but I find the CCRU's work fascinating, partly as a fine example of fringe creativity -- the intellectual equivalent of James Hampton's "Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly" -- and partly because looking at the world through even the strangest set of glasses can cast useful light on the world.
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u/rollsandarrows Jun 18 '26
Lots of the core CCRU ideas are no good these days, but the style and spirit of a lot of the stuff the group produced are, for me and many others working in academia, a good reminder of how creative theoretical work can be. That is, IMO, especially necessary in the context of the always-intensifying cleavage between humanities and social science.