In this episode, we chew on a question that’s been on Dougald’s mind since a recent event in London, where Brian Eno wondered what is the difference between an analysis which says we cannot save or make sustainable the trajectories of industrial modernity and technological progress, and an accelerationist position which says we need to bring about collapse in order to release the possibilities to be found in the ruins? What would a “decelerationist” politics look like?
Shownotes
Derek Gow, Birds, Beasts and Bedlam
- , New Wild Order
James Kaelan, 999 Years of Peace is “a luddite publication, not for sale”, but you could try sending Cartoon Distortion a message on Instagram to find out more.
- , author of Fully Alive was talking at The Kairos Club, London this week. Kairos currently has paperback copies of At Work in the Ruins on sale for £10 and some great events coming up with friends of this podcast:
Strategic Adaptation For Emergency Resilience (SAFER) with Rupert Read, Tuesday 26 November
A New Cosmology: Feeling Our Way into the Imaginal with
, Thursday 28 November
Ece Temulkeran, How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship
Dougald quotes from
’s comment on our election day episodeWatching “accelerationism” move over the last decade and a bit:
#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics by Alex Williams & Nick Srnicek (2013)
Paul Mason, Clear Bright Future (2019)
Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2019)
Nick Land – “the Godfather of accelerationism”, from the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (alongside Mark Fisher of Capitalist Realism) in the 1990s to Neo-reaction and the Dark Enlightenment
‘Accelerationism: the obscure idea inspiring white supremacist killers around the world’, Vox magazine, 2019.
Iona Lawrence & The Decelerator – “We support organisations and individuals to anticipate and design closures, mergers, CEO transitions, programming ends, and all sorts of endings as just part of the everyday life of organisations and inevitable cycles of change in civil society.”
Hospicing Modernity, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (in case we haven’t mentioned it before!)
Only Planet – Ed’s around-the-world slow travel book
- writes on Substack at and will feature on an upcoming episode of Homeward Bound
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1942), Ch.3, makes the argument for a historical example of “decelerationism”:
Why should the ultimate victory of a trend be taken as a proof of the ineffectiveness of the efforts to slow down its progress? And why should the purpose of these measures not be seen precisely in that which they achieved, i.e., in the slowing down of the rate of change? That which is ineffectual in stopping a line of development altogether is not, on that account, altogether ineffectual. The rate of change is often of no less importance than the direction of the change itself ; but while the latter frequently does not depend upon our volition, it is the rate at which we allow change to take place which well may depend upon us. […] England withstood without grave damage the calamity of the enclosures only because the Tudors and the early Stuarts used the power of the Crown to slow down the process of economic improvement until it became socially bearable — employing the power of the central government to relieve the victims of the transformation, and attempting to canalize the process of change so as to make its course less devastating.
- at quotes Gustav Landauer, as he reflects on the US election in A short word and a poem for my daughter at day’s end:
The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another… We are the State and we shall continue to be the State until we have created the institutions that form a real community.
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