Hacker News Reader

Comment by extr | Hacker News Reader

i don't really follow those circles well so maybe i'm giving her too much credit. what does UACC stand for?

unconditional acceleration — think accelerationism but replace the traditional adherence on partisan political paradigms (seen in L/ACC and R/ACC) with a Landian (Nick Land from the CCRU) cyberpunk eschatological cult that employs ironic internet culture and an anti-Fordist faux-mythologization of 19th century literature & material relations à la alt-right.

There was an attempt to institutionalize the movement (outside of the twitter-sphere) through the likes of LD50[0] and Vince Garton's Urbanomic piece[1], but since their whole ideology is based around the principles of "anti-praxis" the entire thing is kind of just a big self-own imo.

Anyway, I find people like Alice Maz (who suckle themselves onto these fashionable but theoretically barren movements that fetishize an aesthetic in order to aggrandize their own narcissistic image[2]) kind of annoying. I don't doubt that Maz may make interesting observations about tech and cs, but I can't stand the constant alt-right posturing on her tl.

[0]: although it is more of an outwardly alt-right thing, many of the U/ACC people seem to engage and condone what is happening there

[1]: https://www.urbanomic.com/document/leviathan-rots/

[2]: I find this behavior also expresses itself more generally in the tech world through the proliferation of ideological contempt culture and platform capitalism

This raised more questions than answers for me.

What are we even talking about here? Economic theory? Political ideology? Philosophy?

What exactly is anti-Fordist, accelerationism, L/ACC, R/ACC and CCRU?

If it is any consolation, I had the same reaction. I could look up all those terms, but I'm not interested enough to bother.

That's what happens when someone wants to look/sound smart, but actually isn't - lots of jargon, piled like spaghetti, impossible to follow.

Actual smart people are generally effective at explaining complex things succinctly and in simple terms.

A bit harsh. He might be busy rather than a charlatan.

I often err on the hand-wavey side when I don't have time to do the topic any justice. It was just a HN comment after all.

Yes. Though effective communication involves knowing who you are speaking too.

I have a mental model about the typical HN reader. So, for example, I would not bother explaining the term 'container' in the context of application deployment. Even for devops who don't use containers, just hanging around here providers plenty of exposure to that concept.

But in this case...

It sounds like a lot of it is social circles. It's hard to explain social circles without using internal shorthand.

New for me, too. Looks like accelerationism is a bit of everything. Legitimate applied philosophy, I guess the communists were some early accelerationists.

I feel like this is the link someone above me should have shared:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism#Contemporary_a...

SEEMS LIKE philosophy-type sub-communities trying to figure out how to use all this new tech these past few decades to achieve 'post-capitalism'. Lots of room for different political tribes, in that direction.

Tempted to check out a book related to this stuff, but I haven't exactly had my philosophical world rocked yet by anything I've read about it yet.

thanks for the genuine reply and explanation, it was right at my level of familiarity as i'm just tangentially aware of accerlerationism/nick land. when i googled LD50 i realized I had heard of that too, and funnily enough twitter brings up alice maz's retweet of kantbot's coverage of it when you search the hashtag. unconditional accelerationism seems pretty stupid, i'll look on her TL with a little less charity now. thanks.

Sorry, but here's what I'm reading:

> unconditional acceleration — think <stuff I don't understand> à la alt-right.

Now I wonder if I've gotten the jist of it or not.

Interesting theories.

Although I sincerely hope these people don't drive automobiles the way they advocate running society.

https://vincentgarton.com/2017/06/12/unconditional-accelerat...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com