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Comment by chobeat | Hacker News Reader

Keep in mind that "accelerationism" has been used in many different ways throughout history. Currently the most widespread usage is the Landian one but this wikipedia page is very superficial in describing it.

And yes, from the original work of Nick Land many different political movements and categories are born, starting from the same analysis and the same philosophical toolbox but arriving at very different conclusion. L/acc, R/acc, U/acc, NRX and so on have almost nothing in common to the neophyte and framing them as sides of a single movement is quite pointless and confusing.

As a xenoaccelerationist active in some L/acc circles, feel free to ask me questions or pointers for good readings.

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First question: what's a xenoaccelerationist? Is it appropriate to abbreviate it as X/acc? How does it relate to xenofeminism?

What are 2 to 3 introductory texts you would recommend on acc in general and X/acc in particular?

I've read "Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics", "Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation" and "#Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader", what your thoughts on these books?

My apologies for all the questions, but since you're offering I'd figured I'd ask.

I've never seen that abbreviation and I don't like them but if you like, use it. Multiplicities!

I would say that you need Inventing the future, that while being limited in many things, is a necessary read.

Then proceed with Capitalist Realism and if you like it, Fanged Noumena.

As a side note, Marxist scholar Antonio Negri has some thoughts on the accelerationist manifesto: http://criticallegalthinking.com/2014/02/26/reflections-acce...

Xenofeminism is powerful

> Hester also makes compelling and unexpected links between these second-wave feminist strategies and those of contemporary transfeminism, uncovering unlikely affinities between schools of thought often positioned in antagonism. In both of these historical instances, individuals acquire power over their bodies through building networks and repurposing everyday technologies. For Hester, the Del-Em is a direct antecedent to online trans* communities providing medical support or even grey-market hormones. At the threshold of this continuum is another of Hester’s evocative examples – a transgenic plant developed by Open Source Gendercodes which allows laypeople to grow sex hormones within tobacco leaves.

For some reason I was expecting something more interesting than the same feminism and transgender politics...

it is more interesting. It's about technology, it's about aliens, it's about new forms of being together.

Open-sourcing hormones is not really "same transgender politics".

It's about empowerment through technology and how to rethink technology to empower people. every technology creator should read it.

My first ask would be just some help cutting through the jargon. I can guess from the wikipedia article, and general political context, that the "L/" and "R/" stands for "Left" and "Right", not "Liberal", "Reform", "Restrained", or similar.

But then what is "U/"? Utopian? Utilitarian? Unrestrained? Similar with "NRX", which I cannot even begin to guess at.

From the linked Nick Land article, NRx seems to be neoreactionary.

Seems many movements fall in love with their own jargon and spend time attempting to distinguish themselves from other movements but only end up sounding even more obfuscatory.

Obfuscation serves as a surprisingly effective spam filter though....

My guess would be unconditional.

U is unconditional, yes. It's not clear to me what they are or want exactly.

(Cross post from another comment elsewhere) I'm not the best at understanding or explaining accelerationism, but I'll give it a shot.

Accelerationism is that the current neoliberalism order will "naturally" progress to a next phase of society.

I gather that left-accelerationists (L/acc) usually subscribe to the labor theory of value, and so automation's decrease of labor value to 0 will result in a collapse of capitalism that derives value of goods and services from the labor needed to produce them.

Right-accelerationism (R/acc) seeks to embrace the disruption of technology to a logical extreme for technologial progress. Neo-Reaction (NRx) wants to revert back to pre-democratic ideals as they see democracy as being incompatible with their techno-libertarian ideals.

I haven't heard of xenoaccelerationism (X/acc?) before but upon a cursory glance, it seems similar in that it embraces the disruption of culture and identity politics by technology's increasing encroachment and control on nature. It sounds like an overlap with transhumanism, but I am probably uninformed about the finer details.

Are NRx people libertarians though? That seems somewhat opposed to the fetishism of Monarchy.

Unconditional. Quoting from rational wiki:

"U/Acc claims that there is no action that can lead to acceleration or deacceleration, and that "To the question ‘What is to be done?’, then, she can legitimately answer only, 'Do what thou wilt'". This however does not mean "do nothing", it rather means that "the unconditional accelerationist, more than anyone else, is free at heart to pursue what she thinks is good and right and interesting—but with the ironical realisation that the primary ends that are served are not her own."

Incidentally a nice talk on the topic is about to begin: https://m.twitch.tv/trust_support/profile?desktop-redirect=o...

>xenoaccelerationist

Could you explain this term?

Left wing accelerationism as pictured by Snircek and Williams in their work is missing a lot. It just references women's issues, minorities' issues and colonial issues but doesn't really incorporate or develop ideas on how to integrate solutions to these problems in an accelerationist, pro-technology, anti-natural perspective.

So there are a bunch of authors and collectives working to enrich, directly or indirectly, this ideological framework to make it more encompassing of different human problems. Xenofeminism is one of them but it's also a lot more than that. While there is a certain dialogue between xenofeminism and the accel world, they don't really pose themselves as "we like these two guys, let's add something to their work" but more as an indipendent field of research and an indipendent methodology.

Xenoaccelerationism is what sits at the conjunction of these two positions, that while similar, can still exist without the other. But to me, it's pointless to abolish work under accelerationism if we cannot abolish gender under xenofeminism. It's pointless to talk about technology repurposing under accelerationism without talking about technology dissemination and hacking under xenofeminism. It's pointless to fight bio-capitalism under accelerationism without fighting the structures that allow it under xenofeminism.

Thank you for the very interesting response.

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