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.