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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Accelerationism | 4/9 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T14:56:05.593251+00:00 | kb-cron |
==== Prometheanism ==== Prometheanism is a term closely associated with accelerationism, particularly the left-wing variant, referencing the Greek figure of Prometheus. Fluss and Frim associate it with posthumanism and using innovation and technology to surpass the limits of nature, characterizing it as misanthropic in stating "for the Promethean, flesh-and-blood 'humanity' is an arbitrary limit on the unlimited powers of technology and invention." Yuk Hui characterizes Prometheanism as "decoupling the social critique of capitalism from denigrating technology and asserting the power of technology to free us from constraints and contradictions or from modernity." Patrick Gamez describes it as exalting rationality like transhumanists, but taking the posthumanist stance of de-prioritizing humans, viewing reason as not exclusive to humanity. He distinguishes this use of the term from previous usage by Günther Anders for "our troubling technological condition", as well as by John Dryzek to describe an environmental position, though "they at least share in the spirit" of accelerationist Prometheanism. Srnicek characterizes it as "the basic political and philosophical belief that there are no immutable givens — there is no transcendental which cannot be altered". Ray Brassier's "Prometheanism and its Critics", compiled in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, addresses Jean-Pierre Dupuy's Heideggerean critique of human enhancement and transhumanism. Critiquing the man-made vs. natural distinction as arbitrary and theological, Brassier expresses openness to the possibility of re-engineering human nature and the world through rationalism instead of accepting them as they are, stating "Prometheanism is simply the claim that there is no reason to assume a predetermined limit to what we can achieve or to the ways in which we can transform ourselves and our world." Srnicek and Williams used the term in stating "we declare that only a Promethean politics of maximal mastery over society and its environment is capable of either dealing with global problems or achieving victory over capital". Negarestani and Wolfendale use the concept of inhuman rationalism (or rationalist inhumanism), advocating reason to radically transform humans into something else. James Trafford and Wolfendale state that rationalist inhumanism "aims to extract the essential core of humanism [rationality] by discarding those features that are consequences of indexing rational agency to the biology, psychology, and cultural history of Homo sapiens." Trafford and Wolfendale note that the work of Wolfendale, Negarestani, and Brassier has also been deemed neo-rationalism. Prometheanism and left-accelerationism are connected to the work of Wilfrid Sellars. Sellars rejects the myth of the given, or the concept that sense perceptions can provide reliable knowledge of the world or that a reliable connection between the mind and the world can be established without requiring other concepts. This establishes a distinction between the manifest image of knowledge through common sense and experience versus the scientific image of knowledge through empirical hard science. Fluss and Frim use the example of emotions and deliberative choice (the manifest image) versus neurobiology's study of brain states and firing neurons (the scientific image). Prometheanism tends towards a rejection or deletion of the manifest image. For Fluss and Frim, left-accelerationists assert that there is no permanent, intelligible world that can be known. Rather, the world beyond human senses is "irremediably alien", but humans pretend it is not "in order to maintain our parochial prejudices in everyday life". Thus, left-accelerationists adopt an ideology of technoscience and a rejection of subordinating technology and science to human concerns. This is exemplified with Brassier sarcastically demanding that a Heideggerian “explain precisely how, for example, quantum mechanics is a function of our ability to wield hammers.”
=== Hyperstition ===
Hyperstition is a term attributed to Land, as well as the CCRU, characterized by Fluss and Frim as the view "that our chosen beliefs about the future (however fanciful) can retroactively form and shape our present realities". Land defines it as "a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies. Superstitions are merely false beliefs, but hyperstitions—by their very existence as ideas—function causally to bring about their own reality." Accelerationism is hyperstitional in constructing a prefigurative political imaginary of the very transformation it initiates. Noys stated, "[The] CCRU tried to create images of this realized integrated human-technology world that would resonate in the present and so hasten the achievement of that world. Such images were found in cyberpunk science-fiction, in electronic dance music, and in the weird fiction of H. P. Lovecraft." Simon O'Sullivan notes the theory-fiction writing style, particularly of Land, Plant and Negarestani, as being an example, anticipated by writers like William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, and Baudrillard. Viewpoint Magazine used Roko's Basilisk as an example, stating "Roko's Basilisk isn't just a self-fulfilling prophecy. Rather than influencing events toward a particular result, the result is generated by its own prediction". The mechanism of hyperstition is understood as a form of feedback loop. According to Ljubisha Petrushevski, Land considers capitalism to be hyperstitional in that it reproduces itself via fictional images in media which become actualized. This phenomenon is viewed as a series of forces invading from the future, using capital to retroactively bring about their own existence and push humanity towards a singularity. Noys notes Terminator and its use of time travel paradoxes as being influential to the concept. Land states "Capitalist economics is extremely sensitive to hyperstition, where confidence acts as an effective tonic, and inversely". Fluss and Frim state that the left-wing perspective rejects pre-emptive knowledge of what a humane or advanced civilization may look like, instead viewing future progress as wholly open and a matter of free choice. Progress is then viewed as hyperstitional in that it consists of fictions which aim to become true. They also note its influence on Negarestani's thought, in which inhumanism is seen as arriving from the future in order to abolish its initial condition of humanism.
== Variants ==