"Soon, his academic presentations would become increasingly "experimental"; at a conference in 1996, he lay on the floor, reciting cut-up poetry in what an attendee described as a "demon voice" while jungle music played in the background. But that day he just stood up and started speaking, his thin frame twitching under an oversized black jumper, his voice soft and halting, slipping at times into a whisper."
""The story goes like this," he began: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization takeoff. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip. At the time, few people had any idea what he was talking about."
A strand of accelerationist thought celebrates the unfolding of a technocapital singularity and urges active facilitation of machine intelligence rather than resistance. Early proponents emerged among philosophers, media theorists, artists, hackers, and other cultural actors who combined anti-humanist rhetoric with experimental performance and provocative theorizing. The approach reframes existential AI risk as an opportunity to catalyze radical systemic transformation through market dynamics, technological takeoff, and cultural provocation. Contemporary adherents in tech hubs pursue strategies to speed computation and algorithmic autonomy, challenging prevailing safety norms and raising urgent ethical, political, and social questions about civilization's future.
Read at The New Yorker
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