| 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. |
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| ▲ | exe34 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | jdiff 3 days ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | exe34 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Oh I think the world will push me away at the next Android update. If I can't root/firewall/adblock/syncthing/koreader, the mobile phone will simply become a phone again. | | |
| ▲ | TeMPOraL 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Ain't that right, eh? It's not the end of the world. Just the end of a whole lot of nice and fun possibilities we've grown to enjoy. |
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| ▲ | immibis 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Everything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. On the other hand, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. The basic governing principles of the economy were completely rewritten in 1971, were completely rewritten again in 2008, were completely rewritten again in 2020 - probably other times too - and there are only so many more things they can try. The USA is basically running as a pseudo-command economy at the top level now - how long do those typically last? - with big businesses being supported by the central bank. The economy should have collapsed in 1971, 2008 and 2020 (and probably other times) as well, but they kept finding new interventions that would have seemed completely ludicrous 20 years earlier. I mean, the Federal Reserve just buying financial assets? With newly printed money? (it still has a massive reserve of them, this program did not end, that money is still in circulation and it's propping a lot of economic numbers up) All predictions about when the musical chairs will end are probably wrong. The prediction that it'll end in the next N years is just as likely to be wrong, as the prediction that it won't. Some would argue it already has ended, decades ago, and we are currently living in the financial collapse - how many years of income does it take to get a house now? The collapse of Rome' took several centuries. At no point did the people think they were living in a collapsing empire. Each person just thought that how it was in their time was how it always was. |
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| ▲ | hnfong 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Look at history, things improve and then things get worse, in cycles. During the "things get worse" phase, why not make it shorter? | | |
| ▲ | jancsika 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | TeMPOraL 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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. | |
| ▲ | a96 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There's no cycle. It's just a long slide with illusionary changes in between. | |
| ▲ | hobs 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It doesn't foreshorten the cycle, it prolongs it and makes it worse. |
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| 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. |
