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Humans : correct in making leap from wealth as currency to wealth as energy. But logic failure : wealth ultimately is extension of desires, fluctuating with emotions and state of mind. Desires : when all are supported in purely adaptable system, true wealth is achieved.
-Usurper Judaa Marr, "Human : Nature"
this is maybe the most coherent political ideology I’ve ever had, I’m kind of excited: 1) Climate change is irreversible. There is no way - other than an arbitrarily restrictive and probably needlessly difficult exercise in self-terraforming - we are going to return to anything resembling a “natural” Earth system. If there are specific aspects of the current ecosystem we would wish to conserve - such as biodiversity, temperate weather, specific local equilibria - we must isolate them from any presumed set of “natural” interrelations and figure out how to influence new conditions to maintain and generate them in new ways. 2) Climate change is not a crisis based on scarcity or depletion of resources for consumption. It is quite literally a surplus of productive solar energy in the Earth system which its current structures are inadequate to use productively or expend, and which unused can only destroy. Some proportion of solar energy must always be wasted (Bataille), and our current systems have little or no effective control of this waste; where they do, the forms it takes are not desirable. The “accursed share” must be decided on and disposed of collectively and rationally; the share that can be used productively can and should be maximized. Climate change can and should be seen as a positive opportunity; attempts to simply “mitigate” instead of harnessing it are not only doomed but regressive. 3) In a non-orthogonal, unconditional sense, all of this (the Anthropocene, the formation of radically new systems of energy circulation) will inevitably happen regardless of our efforts. The goals of “Green Accelerationist” praxis, therefore, should be understood in strictly political terms (and from my stake in this comes in, leftist ones: the capacity for productive energy use and the right to a say in destructive expenditure should be fairly distributed, not only among humans but, as far as possible, throughout the biosphere as a whole). However the most effective methods for achieving those goals will likely be found as far from the “political” as currently understood as possible. All present “political” institutions - states, activist organizations, - are as obsolete as the ecological ones, and will only drain any energy invested in them. The “economic”, as a direct site of energy circulation, is a more useful site of contestation, and traditional working class tactics of organization and disruption will likely remain valuable tools for redirecting energy into more sustainable cycles. However, the “technical” (including not only positive acts of production, but hacking and sabotage) will become a probably more important site of political contestation, as well as (to an extent identical) the “ecological” itself. Different technologies will open radically different political and ecological prospects - and different social deployments of technologies conversely must be thought of as technically, not only politically, different. Technology, ecology and politics are no longer feasibly separable: they are all concerned with directing energy circulation at a global scale. 4) Technical development as a form of praxis must not be allowed to be monopolized by existing institutions such as corporations, universities and governments, which determine its current “political” character. We must not treat the control of technology by obsolete and reactionary forms as a politically neutral fact whose products are then to be harnessed and regulated by a separate “politics”, as in naive forms of “ecomodernism”. Control of the means of research and development is as if not more important to political outcomes in the near term than control of existing means of production. Making scientific research widely accessible is perhaps the most significant struggle currently being fought; it should be understood as the minimal precondition for almost any effective ecological praxis. 5) Green Accelerationism should be distinguished from naive ecomodernism, not only in its radical approach to the specific conditions of technical development, but in adopting a general critique of extractivism. Extractivism is a specific, dangerous, ineffective and inherently reactionary technical, ecological and political formation that treats vast swathes of sophisticated circulatory infrastructure purely as sites of energy extraction for a small set of processes. Extractivism should not be conflated with technology itself, whose role is now to design as many new mutually beneficial and sustainable relationships as possible. 6) Green Accelerationism should strive not only for interdependence but independence, not only for humans or an economic or national elite but for as many living beings as possible. With a large energetic surplus and sophisticated, redundant social, political & ecological technologies permitting a wide multiplicity of sustainable relationships, the coercive dimension of ecological interrelation (understood by the Enlightenment as “nature”) can be minimized. Nor should we limit our sights to the “terrestrial”. Access to the resources, energy and literal space of the rest of the universe would increase the flexibility and resilience of systems on Earth to change, as well as allowing greater individual independence for individuals. Clean space travel is an ideal non-destructive outlet for excess energy that cannot be redirected into circulation on Earth. 7) The category of “ecology” resolves the antinomy of “praxis” and “anti-praxis” posed by the Unconditional Accelerationists. No single element, including the human, within an ecological process can direct it, but ecological relationships are always reciprocal, even if unintentionally: struggling to adapt and struggling to influence are the same. Green Accelerationism, however, emphatically rejects the claims that powerful nonlinear, nonhuman processes are incomprehensible - perhaps by humans, but the act of comprehension itself can be ecologically distributed - and that (extractive) “technocapital” is out of all of these inevitably the most powerful, except insofar as any combination of energy and intelligent organization is “technocapital”, a definition that obscures the territorialization of energy flows at present by a specific extractive class that is inadequate to the force it has unleashed. Technocapital is not the genie, it is the bottle. The unharnessed share of solar energy increasingly exceeds that enclosed in existing “technocapital”. Whoever or whatever controls this share controls the future.