By Sandy Di Yu and April Wei-West
Back then, the eschatological hope constituted the course of “history,” since the ancient cyclical nature of time, which had been forbidden for all of history, was abolished [aufgehoben] by the fact that whatever remained would course forwards down a one-way street in the direction of the “kingdom.” On the contrary, when we anticipate the end, we anticipate the end of history. – Günther Anders, Apocalypse without Kingdom
To secede from or disavow capitalist machinery will not make it disappear. Likewise, suggestions to pull the lever on the emergency brake of embedded velocities, the call to slow down and scale back, is a possibility available only to the few–a violent particularity of exclusivity–ultimately entailing catastrophe for the many. – The Xenofeminist Manifesto
There is a palpable gloom in the sooted air of our post-digital condition. It lands on your skin, sticky like tar, weighing down eyelids and rendering limbs motionless. Can you feel it too, this grief for the hauntological reverie of futures imagined yet unachievable, a seasonal depression for the endless final season?
The world's impending end induces catatonia in even the most sprightly of us, turning earnest hope into ironic despondence. This “secularised Christian eschatology” has dominated Western critical discourse since Cold War times, resurfacing every few years in more potent forms as the horizon of an open future is foreclosed in the wake of anthropocentric climate emergency, algorithmic governmentality, and data-driven fascist pipelines. Each is exacerbated by the open availability of generative artificial intelligence and derivative investment, feeding off of us to spit out uncanny versions of our un-potential selves. None of us asked for this. I hate it here; can we leave yet?
In this desolate post-digital landscape, there exist echoes of techno-optimists who once touted the possibility of escape by pummeling through the murk of capital itself. The accelerationists, who are neither innately technological nor digital, revel in the contradictions of late modernity. Where algorithms materialise as autonomous occult forces, there is no more happy A to B, no more neat beginning to end, no more linear ecology of emergent properties. Instead, there is only a vast inhuman matrix, magnetised around the digital monolith chilling in the backseat of a Cybertruck ploughing towards the end of the world.
But accelerationists put a chokehold on the digital automaton, practising in magic to tame its occult power in a ploy at aesthetic future-ing; the making of internal sabotage. In their most contemporary iterations, accelerationists are wrapped in a gloss that despair cannot adhere to, hardening into a candy-coated shell impenetrable by doomerism and extinction. They slide slickly towards, and through to, the end of all that is known, breaking open another chapter hidden beneath the eschatological façade of our shared narratives. In the face of the apocalypse, can we borrow and redistribute this accelerationist gloss to restore the missing historicism of our apocalyptic times? Could it be swallowed to lubricate our festering intestines, to help pass the red or black pill that constipates our imagination? Can we use it like varnish or glue to cover the vulnerable and the broken in an attempt to mend or enact care, such that our present reality, suffused by the dominion of the digital, might unfold into an epoch beyond the end of history? And if we cannot co-opt the gloss, is there a way to occupy a liminal space that operates outside of the accelerationist-eschatological sphere?
In the third iteration of DiSCo Journal, we pose these questions as background noise to theorists and practitioners, for them to concretise the future fog into shapes that may offer unexpected methods for resistance and breakage. Withholding a normative stance on accelerationism as a reality/practicality, we revisit this controversial ideology through a softer, silkier speculum, a way to shield against the dire onslaught of post-digital anguish.