The future, always so clear to me, has become like a black highway at night. We were in uncharted territory now…making up history as we went along.
As the hallucinatory Empire of the Spirit dissipates and the lamps go out all over Europe, the timeline from ‘savagery to humanity’ shatters into ‘chaotically splintered moments’, shrapnel whose only conceivable ordering principle is that of a Kurtz-gradient leading ‘from the slingshot to the megaton bomb’ via an evacuation of interiority that climaxes in ‘the epitome of discontinuity’. But ‘if the universal comes at the end […] where do we find the innocence to generate universal history’? That is, to generate it as something other than a secularised eschatology that misconstrues the cybernetics of positive feedback as a gradual revelation of finality (Kant’s Basilisk, self-realisation of the absolute, destiny of humanity, AGI as electroGeist…)?
Neither acquiescence to inevitable dark fate nor reiteration of the control fantasy of politics, if accelerationism is anything it is the theory and practice of desiring-production: positive feedback circuitries that plug the future into the present, convoluting directionality without resolution or redemption, persistently recrypting universal history as ‘history of contingencies’.
All that was solid heats up and begins to churn like lava. Orange light of the enormous black-furnaces dances on liquid metal. Blossoming in agony, the Thing cycles through every guise it has ever adopted as it melts into the industrial infrastructure from which it will have emerged. Liquid silver running in dissipating whorls over the superheated surface…until it vanishes, swirling into nothing… Through red scan lines, we see all the gloomy preoccupations of the Old Continent flicker out. Spirit, History, Sense…fade to black.
They accelerate back onto the highway.