Comment by SV_BubbleTime
2 months ago
Do you know what Accelerate means?
I want them to go overboard. I want BigTech to go nuts on this stuff. I want broken systems and nonsense.
Because that’s the only way we’re going to get anything better.
2 months ago
Do you know what Accelerate means?
I want them to go overboard. I want BigTech to go nuts on this stuff. I want broken systems and nonsense.
Because that’s the only way we’re going to get anything better.
Accelerationism is a dead-end theory with major holes in its core. Or I should say, "their" core, because there's a million distant and mutually-incompatible varieties. Everyone likes to say "gosh, things are awful, it MUST end in collapse, and after the collapse everyone will see things MY way." They can't all be right. And yet, all of them with their varied ideas still think it'll be a good idea to actively push to make things worse in order to bring on the collapse more quickly.
It doesn't work. There aren't any collapses like that to be had. Big change happens incrementally, a bit of refactoring and a few band-aids at a time, and pushing to make things worse doesn't help.
I'm not waiting for the collapse to fix things - I'm waiting for it so that I won't have any more distractions and I can go back to my books.
As I said, there aren't any collapses like that to be had. Heaven and Earth will be moved to make the smallest change necessary to keep things flowing as they were. Banks aren't allowed to fail. Companies, despite lengthy strings of missteps and billions burned on dead ends, still remain on top.
You can step away from the world (right now, no waiting required). But the world can remain irrational longer than you can wait for it to step away from you, and pushing for more irrationality won't make a dent in that.
3 replies →
Look at history, things improve and then things get worse, in cycles.
During the "things get worse" phase, why not make it shorter?
Let's give it a shot.
The year is 2003. Svn and cvs are proving to be way too clunky and slow for booming open source development.
As an ethical accelerationist, you gain commit access to the repos for svn and cvs and make them slower and less reliable to accelerate progress toward better version control.
Lo and behold, you still have to wait until 2025 for git to be released. Because git wasn't written to replace svn or cvs-- it was written as the result of internal kernel politics wrt access to a closed-source source management program Bitkeeper. And since svn and cvs were already bad enough that kernel devs didn't choose them, you making them worse wouldn't have affected their choice.
Also, keep in mind that popularity of git was spurred by tools that converted from svn to git. So by making svn worse, you'd have made adoption of git harder by making it harder on open source devs to write reliable conversion tools.
To me, this philosophy looks worse than simply doing nothing at all. And this is in a specific domain where you could at least make a plausible, constrained argument for accelerationism. Your comment instead seems to apply to accelerationism applied to software in general-- there, the odds of you being right are so infinitesimal as to be fatuous.
In short, you'd do better playing the lottery because at least nothing bad happens to anyone else when you lose.
> During the "things get worse" phase, why not make it shorter?
Because it never gets better for the people actually living through it.
I imagine those in favor of the idea of accelerating collapse aren't all so purely selfless that they're willing to see themselves and their children suffer and die, all so someone elses' descendants can live in a better world.
Nah, they just aren't thinking it through.
There's no cycle. It's just a long slide with illusionary changes in between.
It doesn't foreshorten the cycle, it prolongs it and makes it worse.
If you showed me the current state of YouTube 8 years ago - multiple unskippable ads before each video, 5 midrolls for a 10 minute video, comments overran with bots, video dislikes hidden, the shorts hell, the dysfunctional algorithm, .... - I would've definitely told you "Yep, that will be enough to kill it!"
At this point I don't know - I still have the feeling that "they just need to make it 50% worse again and we'll get a competitor," but I've seen too many of these platforms get 50% worse too many times, and the network effect wins out every time.
It's classic frog boiling. I want them (for whatever definition of "them") to just nuke the frog from orbit.