Forum images, what's your take on an idea?
Hong Wu wrote:Although the term "accelerationism" has left and right variants, the basic argument seems to be that since capitalism has self-destructive tendencies (e.g., "late stage capitalism") the best way to fight capitalism is actually to encourage it to become as extreme as possible, thereby bringing about its own collapse. If the argument that capitalism destroys itself is correct, shouldn't all communists be accelerationists in at least some form?
The rate of change of the
velocity of an object in the noosphere directly affects the structure of society.
McLuhan departs from the media theory of Harold Innis in suggesting that a medium "overheats", or reverses into an opposing form, when taken to its extreme. The medium we call capitalism is an organizational concept that resides in the mind and
bleeds through reality. All media produce field effects, which ripple throughout our milieu.
I know you're a linear or sequential thinker because you've been culturally trained to think in such a way
(after-all, it's a quantitative and qualitative function of the communication process or language as it's encoded and decoded), hence why you focus on "stages" rather than the vortex or matrices of change. This way of modeling the rate of change of any concept is completely outdated. The evolutionary extensions of a medium or in this case capitalism, are present in its inception. Alfred Wallace said:
Modification of form is admitted to be a matter of time. Socialism, Communism, etc; are extensions of capitalism. Ideas and physical tools are the same thing, but one has been given a material form in reality. And just like ideas, physical tools contain evolutionary extensions. The telegraph and the smartphone are contained in the same conceptual framework. It wasn't a groundbreaking notion to suggest that capitalism leads to socialism or communism. Marx understood Aristotelian thought (Four Causes) and Hegel, and he applied dialectics to the interplay of a material and efficient cause.
The vector and mechanism of acceleration is technology.Changes in the environment (ground) automatically reshape or influence the people (figures). This is a field effect.
The laws of the tetrad exist simultaneously, not successively or chronologically, and allow the questioner to explore the "grammar and syntax" of the "language" of media.
1. What does the medium enhance?
2. What does the medium make obsolete?
3. What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
4. What does the medium reverse or flip into when pushed to extremes?Enhancement (figure): What the medium amplifies or intensifies. For example, radio amplifies news and music via sound.
Obsolescence (ground): What the medium drives out of prominence. Radio reduces the prominence of print and the visual.
Retrieval (figure): What the medium recovers which was previously lost. Radio returns the spoken word to the forefront.
Reversal (ground): What the medium does when pushed to its limits. Acoustic radio flips into audio-visual TV.Lastly, accelerationism is a technological system of unfolding effects. Social change will always revolve around technological adaptation. Nonetheless, an organism's ability to adapt to a new technological environment
(or conceptual system of organization) is not the exclusive trait of Darwinian natural selection. Darwin failed to recognize the environment as a programmable network of psycho-social biochemical communication and therefore failed to anticipate humanity's ability to intelligently structure its evolution. Marx and Engels failed to anticipate
(minus the updates which come from Marxist successors) the
other and perhaps final extension of capitalism, which is Technocracy. Technocracy obsolesces communism, because Technocracy obsolesces humanity.
In other-words, your thread is obsolete. Look around you, the technocracy is here. The perpetual acceleration scheme or Technocratic control system is in place and all you gotta do is participate. This thread is therapy for a simple life sentence. A safe pace, or place, where you can rehash the past and ignore the present. History ended with the implementation of the internet
(provocative suggestion, but yesterday is here). The Noogenesis begins with 0 and ends with 1.
Enjoy the ride,
-RT