Beyond Accelerationism
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
133.42934
Summary
Jon Kepperman joins me in this episode to talk about what's going on in Silicon Valley, and why it's important to know what the fuck is going on there. We talk about Peter Thiel, AI, AI doomers, and much more.
Transcript
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Let me ask you a question. So we talked about the fourth political theory, what's next? So
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liberalism's old, communism's dead, fascism's really dead. So what's next? In your dealings
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with the Silicon Valley types, what do they want? Because this is something that we've
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talked about. It was a number of months ago on this podcast, but we've talked about this.
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There's this notion of accelerationism, which is different than like Leninist accelerationism,
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you know, the worse, the better, let the capitalist contradictions work themselves out or something.
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Accelerationism in a Nick Land style of thinking is accelerating towards a cyberpunk future,
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accelerating towards the combination of humanity and technology or biology and technology.
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And we need to just tear down the guardrails for that. The liberals are going to try to stop you.
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The trad conservatives are going to try to stop you. The regulatory bodies are going to try to stop
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you. But we just need to go full steam ahead. We don't know where this train is headed, but
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it's headed somewhere. Let's find out. And you can see some of this thinking. You see a lot of this
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thinking actually in AI advocates. You can see a lot of this thinking in AI doomers who warned that this
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train is headed off a cliff. It's going to kill humanity, et cetera. You can even see this sort of in
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something as a seeming failure like Doge, where it's take a chainsaw to regulations, like full steam ahead.
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Don't even think about cracking down an AI kind of thing. But is that the kind of like secret
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in the heart of hearts of Peter Thiel? I mean, I'm not expecting you to have gone to a Peter Thiel
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party and swilled whiskey and he told you. It's good you never went to one of those because you
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might have been thrown off a roof. That was a joke. What does he want?
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I mean, I think like if you want to go back to acceleration and you want to go back to Nick
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Land. Sure. And then you have to talk about the creative forces behind accelerationism, the
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visionary technologists who are building a future by merging art and technology together.
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That was how the CCRU at Warwick started with Nick Land and his colleagues. They were these
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dissident academic types who formed their own lab. And the theory of acceleration is not the same as
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transhumanism. I think that people, they conflate the two. Accelerationism is just capitalism taken to
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its logical extent. You're just moving things forward as fast as you can. And Sigma comes out
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the other end. Where transhumanism is, according to Thiel's sphere, it's just about life extension and
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paying a bunch of money to live forever by freezing your brain so you can live a million years. Not the
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same thing as acceleration. Yeah, so I'm not going to gossip about the Thiel sphere and name a bunch of
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characters and be like, oh, this person doesn't battle it. Okay, so I'm going to give a shit about
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any of that. But I can tell you how it works on a topological level. It's not really that much
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different from how an intelligence agency works. Data is extracted and the things that do well are
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replicated through new copies of people who are more manageable assets. The
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manageable assets are replicated into new hires who join the sector and march on through mimesis,
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which is a Travardian concept of ideas being propagated. The manageable assets become dumber
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and dumber, leaning all the way down to, well, red scare groupies and their fans. We're talking about
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fans of red scare groupies. Okay, so these are like the manageable assets, the lowest pinnacle of
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intelligence, right? It all does stream upward, but we're not talking about some conspiracy of
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people in the room. We're just talking about asset management. We're talking about basic
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bitch asset management. And the curators and the producers of the original scenes,
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they often will get the worded out by more manageable assets that are better at brokerage.
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That's the teal network, like any other network. There's nothing really mysterious about it. It
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isn't as exciting as people think. I don't understand why people are so like, are they new?
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Where were they born yesterday? I'm not trying to be an asshole, but it's just not as exciting as people
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think it is. Do you think they did that to what was the alt-right in effect? And the red scare girls
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are a part of that. BAP is a part of that. Although from what, I mean, look, I'm just reading the tea
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leaves here, but it almost seems like BAP is getting marginalized, to me at least.
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But like Jonathan Kepperman or whoever these people, it's creating a simulation of what the alt-right would be,
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but putting in figures who sort of resemble other figures in some kind of funny way and
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making it, I don't even know. It's not even more palatable necessarily. Making it more useful in the
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sense that you can manage an asset to push in one direction or not. I mean, the fact that all of these
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people pushed in the direction of Vance is something that I still am just amazed by.
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Yeah. You have to hand it to them for strategic acumen, but nothing that they did was actually
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new or innovative. When you have people like BAP or the Red Scare Girls, and I'm not going to say that
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they're on Peter Thiel's payroll because I do not have evidence to confirm that. But when you have
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them gatekeeping out new talent and you have them thwarting out the original creators because
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they're too volatile or honest and they become the center of everything and all these news articles,
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they come out featuring their names and everything gets funneled through them. You're going to have
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people that are very angry and that react to the gatekeeping and a million gripers bloom. But I don't think
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this is unique to this period of time. I think this is a pattern that occurs throughout history. It's a Spenglarian cycle.
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And I don't believe that anything that happened during this era was unique on a historical timeline.
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I think that they were just players in a game and that you should view it anthropologically rather than getting