[spectre] The ABC of Accelerationist Blockchain Critique

From: marc garrett - Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2014 10:50:28 +0100

Sorry for any cross posting…

The ABC of Accelerationist Blockchain Critique | New article on Furtherfield.

By Rob Myers - http://go.shr.lc/1jvMf3d

With sculptures that sell themselves on eBay and cryptocurrencies for owning GIF images, art is already in the era of smart contracts. It’s time to use the same technology to solve the crisis of art cirticism. Are you ready for the Accelerationist future of critique on the blockchain?

Accelerationism came to prominence in 2013 with Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s hashtag-titled manifesto. A cloud computing-era spin on the old Marxist argument that we first need to perfect capitalism in order to transcend it, its lineage is fleshed out in a new book from Urbanomic. Urbanomic claim (among others) Nick Land’s skynet midwifery, J.G. Ballard’s science fictionalization of culture, and Marx himself as precursors to Accelerationism, establishing it as a serious anti-humanistic response to the challenges that humanity faces if it is to avoid extinction. Similar to Christine Harold’s strategy of “intensification”, Accelerationism calls for us to appropriate the value of capital’s developments and transform them materially into something else rather than attempt to resist them head-on or refuse them in our hearts.

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