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A Religion of Progress has taken shape over the last 21 centuries, from the Enlightenment to present times. It is quite simple to follow a thread from Hermeticism to today, however, several facts have altered its content, therefore, reformulating some of its promises and vision of the world. This paper attempts to evaluate how that Religion of Progress has become a sort of Techno-Hermeticism 2.0. Digital technologies have redefined old hermetic myths into a high-tech religion with dire environmental consequencies. Some of those myths are the resurrection of the bodies, the construction of the City of God, the Adamic universal language and so forth. Now religion must confront the upcoming collapse, however, it is unable to provide satisfactory answers. This goes for all the different churches, from accelerationists (Nick Land) to extinctionists and believers of digital solutionism. That leaves possible imaginative responses to that sociecological crisis without any relevant proposals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper introduces the transhumanism and cosmic communism of Mao Zedong and discusses its relation to a Marxian conception of human nature and analogous Soviet visions. Having shown that the two-sided understanding of human nature in Marx opened doors for its transhumanist interpretations, the article identifies instances of the latter in the ideal of the New Soviet Man, the views of Trotsky, and the communist (or at least Sovietized) cosmism of Tsiolkovsky and Bogdanov. In parallel to and prior to his contact with Marxism, Mao became occupied with the problems of immortality, alternative spaces, the destruction of the Earth, and the power of human will, and his early transhumanism only revived after 1949. It is shown that based on his revision of historical materialism and belief in the limitless potential of human powers, Mao envisaged that technological and cultural revolutions would still and endlessly occur under communism(s), including their cosmic phases, and even after a global nuclear catastrophe. This would be, however, a future of “something more advanced” than humans, free from their current physical limitations.

El aceleracionismo es una vertiente violenta del neonazismo y una de sus manifestaciones es el fenómeno de los célibes involuntarios que se caracterizan por la misoginia y por exhortar a la violencia contra las mujeres. Pese a tratarse de un fenómeno reciente, la cultura popular lo ha retratado en la obra literaria El cuento de la criada, que ha sido adaptada en la televisión. En este artículo, nuestro principal interés es analizar la naturaleza teocrática del régimen totalitario que se implanta en esa serie y cómo se sustenta gracias a dos ejes: la misoginia y el movimiento de las milicias. Para examinarlo con precisión, recurriremos a fuentes literarias, al visualizado de las entregas televisivas y, finalmente, a las fuentes secundarias de la hemeroteca. Con todo ello daremos cuenta de que, a pesar de tratarse de ficción, los elementos que la componen se plasman en las agrupaciones aceleracionistas. Accelerationism is a violent aspect of neo Nazism and one of its manifestations is the involuntary celibate phenomenon which is characterized by misogyny and by encouraging violence against women. Despite being a recent movement, popular culture has portrayed it in the dystopian novel called The Handmaid's Tale, which has been adapted on television. In this article, our main interest is to analyze the theocratic nature of the totalitarian regime that is implemented in this show and how it is sustained thanks to two axes: misogyny and the militia movement. To analyze it accurately, we will resort to literary sources, viewing the full episodes and, finally, we will take into account secondary sources from the newspaper archives. With all this, we will realize that, despite being fiction, the elements that compose The Handmaid's Tale show are reflected in the accelerationist groups.

In recent decades, philosophical reflection on the utopian has focused on the analysis of the way in which the future-possible and the radically unknown or "other" influence our present. Specifically, accelerationism and Object-oriented Ontology have identified horror and weird fiction in general, and H. P. Lovecraft in particular, as the privileged field from which to access a radically anti-humanist absolute exteriority (Outside) with the aim of developing a new anti-species worldview, one which Timothy Morton calls "Dark Ecology." This article analyzes the philosophical foundations of this worldview, showing the exclusive and proto-fascist character it harbors, which is why it should be clearly separated from other post-humanisms and/or new materialisms based on the hybridization and interconnection characteristic of relational ontologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper aims to problematize the issues of representation and accessing reality in The Making of Incarnation, the latest novel by Tom McCarthy, a prominent contemporary British writer. An engagement with contemporary theoretical discourses is made through the lenses of both posthumanism and poststructuralism. Through an analysis of Deleuze, Guattari and Lyotard’s post-structuralist philosophy, I aim to present the manner in which reality can be accessed precisely through representation and artificiality, and not by inventing manners of bypassing the latter. This feat is possible, as the aforementioned authors’ theory states, owing to the particular nature of representation which entails intensity and energy as a potential of encountering the real. Additionally, by bringing into discussion Land’s more contemporary notion of accelerationism, this paper argues that representation and intensity are only available in a posthuman environment which sidelines the primacy of the human subject. At the core of this essay lies the argument that all of the previous theoretical aspects can be shown to be quintessential in McCarthy’s novel. The latter, I will argue, initially presents the struggles of encountering unmediated reality, to then gradually affirm the potential of representation in and of itself, and then finally to reach the powerful and tantalizing conclusion that the only possible environment which may facilitate such an access of noumenal reality is one which precludes the human altogether, centralizing instead the machinic and technological.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the attitudes of plagiarism in academic writing among postgraduate ELT students. To achieve this purpose, a descriptive survey design was used. The study involved the gathering of data through Attitudes towards Plagiarism (ATP) questionnaire from thirty postgraduate students. Convenience sampling technique was used to select the participants of the study. Descriptive statistics were computed to analyze the collected data. The results of the study reveal that ELT postgraduate students had moderate positive attitudes towards plagiarism. The result also showed that the participants of this study had moderate negative attitude and moderate subjective norms towards plagiarism. Overall, this result suggested that ELT postgraduate students’ attitude towards plagiarism was moderate. In other words, students had moderate attitudes towards the three attitudinal factors: positive attitude, negative attitude and subjective norms.

National Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman recited her inaugural poem for President Biden in January 2021, referencing Maya Angelou, who had been the inaugural poet of President Clinton three decades before, and who referenced, in turn, the first person to recite a poem at a presidential inauguration, Robert Frost, six decades ago. There are clear intertextual connections, which lead to a wider socio-cultural and historical contextualization of the poems, as well as to a political interpretation of the position of the inaugural poet. This kind of reading and contextualization can be useful in the EFL classroom, as the Gen Z cohort, of which Gorman is part, seems more inclined to interact around topics of social issues and current world events, which they consider personally relevant.

In recent decades, philosophical reflection on the utopian has focused on the analysis of the way in which the future-possible and the radically unknown or “other” influence our present. Specifically, accelerationism and Object-oriented Ontology have identified horror and weird fiction in general, and H. P. Lovecraft in particular, as the privileged field from which to access a radically anti-humanist absolute exteriority (Outside) with the aim of developing a new anti-species worldview, one which Timothy Morton calls “Dark Ecology.” This article analyzes the philosophical foundations of this worldview, showing the exclusive and proto-fascist character it harbors, which is why it should be clearly separated from other post-humanisms and/or new materialisms based on the hybridization and interconnection characteristic of relational ontologies.

For this special issue of b2o, we explore Musk’s SpaceX, the NSA’s control room, Biosphere 2, HI-SEAS, and Apple’s new “Spaceship” headquarters. In these projects and artifacts we find highly politicized deployments of Silicon Valley-style scitech, masked as concerned with escape from planet Earth while necessarily downplaying and denying their impetus: the deleterious, long-term effects of human-induced, industrial-scale problems such as resource extraction, environmental destruction, and war. Linked theoretically, conceptually, and politically, both to each other and to their unacknowledged, obfuscated philosophical origins in accelerationism and technological nihilism, these endeavors and their proponents in government and tech sectors represent the ultimate expression of reality TV’s much-discussed “preppers,” ready to start anew somehow and somewhere else. In a final turn, this paper contrasts such endeavors with Trump-era protectionist values (e.g., increased military spending; the detention of migrant children; entrenched, ongoing structural racism; antagonism of longtime allies) seemingly in stark opposition to these manifest desires to leave, rather than defend, the nation. Yet, when read through the lens of accelerationism, such antagonism can be more accurately identified as directly aligned with the hastening of global confrontation, chaos and the deliverance of the chosen few to a fetishized future of their making.

This bibliography contains journal articles, book chapters, books, edited volumes, theses, grey literature, bibliographies and other resources on accelerationism - a specific form of anti-government extremism that aims to push the existing socio-political system toward a violent collapse. The compilation focuses on recent publications (up to December 2022) and should not be considered exhaustive. The literature has been retrieved by manually browsing more than 200 core and periphery sources in the field of Terrorism Studies. Additionally, full-text and reference retrieval systems have been employed to broaden the search. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article provides a critical introduction to or close reading of British philosopher Sadie Plant's original formulation of cyberfeminism. I begin by showing how Plant's earliest work seeks a form of critique--or what she also calls 'the most radical gesture'--that could never be recuperated by the power structures it seeks to contest as has happened to so much critical thought before. I then argue that her cyberfeminist turn is motivated by the discovery that evermore autonomous machines are carving out a space outside the human spectacle from whence our anthropocentric misconceptions can be eliminated. If Plant characterizes this machinic critique as a feminism, it is because she sees increasingly intelligent machines as harbouring the same attributes often associated with women inasmuch as they have both been traditionally treated as a means to the ends of man without any rational agency, fixed identity or humanity of their own. As we shall see, Plant's cyberfeminism is not so much about emancipating women as it is about emancipating feminine structures like irrationality, fluid identity, general intelligence, and even inhumanity, which she finds incarnated in emerging technologies as they spiral outside of man's control in a purely formal feminism, or even a feminism without women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter addresses the resonances between the concept of the virtual and a material philosophy of life, based on heterogeneity, hybridity, and becoming. It outlines the basic tenet of this materialist philosophy and explores its implications, in relation to the notions of difference and becoming. It, also, highlights the importance of an ethics of affirmation, which may balance the creative potential of critical thought with a dose of negative criticism and the oppositional consciousness that such a stance, necessarily, entails. Situating this project in the context of cognitive capitalism, it discusses the question of how to resist the injustice, violence, and exclusions of the times, our times, the better to resist them and engage with them in an affirmative manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the anti-anthropocentric philosophy of Nick Land is discussed from the perspective of the concept of capital – capital becomes a philosophical problem. The origin of Land’s conception of capital as artificial intelligence alien to humanity is traced from the theory of libidinal materialism, the transcendental philosophy of Kant, and also from the historical and cultural background. The ideas of Deleuze and Guattari let Land think of capital as machinically and cybernetically accelerating techno-capital – Land’s intense relation to the process of acceleration is defined here as ecstasy. Also, the problematic interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari is noted, the processes of automatisation and autonomisation are considered, and Land’s teleological vision of technological singularity is criticised, especially from the point of the threats of the climate crisis. Here is shown that the philosophy of Land affectively follows the relevant and important tendencies of capitalism, but suffers from some inner contradictions and paradoxes, according to which we can reasonably doubt the philosopher’s ecstatic celebration of the abyss between capital and human subjectivity.

Copyright of Problems / Problemos is the property of Vilnius University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper aims to start a path of exploration on the generation of the project in the post-digital era through an accelerationist perspective. This implies the consideration of thematic intersections that link the cyborg, the trans, and the xeno. It also forges a vision of the project facing multiple possible futures, where robotics, machine learning, and digital manufacturing will be linked on multiple scales with the biotechnological and the post-natural. This will create an inexorable hybridization between the human and the non-human capable of redefining the inter-systemic relations built on the remains of the Anthropocene, heading towards a physical-digital convergence.

Marcuse’s theory of civilization offer a promising Freud-Marx synthesis. His approach, best articulated in Eros and Civilization, aims at thorough reformulation of the Freudian drive doctrine to render it more historical and concatenate it to the problem of structural violence and institutionalized (and internalized) mechanism of repression. I claim that the said reformulation provides a cornerstone for Marcuse’s highly idiosyncratic variant of a critical theory, which, according to my interpretation, possesses clear protoaccelerationist undertones. The article offers a concise recapitulation of Marcuses’s “dialectics of civilization” and points at the somewhat surprising close convergeneces with acceleraconist version of post-capitalist in his reflection on politics, technology, and the role of arts and aesthetic imagination in challenging the affirmative (and desublimating) character of culture.

This article addresses the increasing levels of complexity and abstraction that digital technologies produce, which generate a feeling of amazement nowadays similar to what the philosophy of art and aesthetics deemed the experience of the sublime. Through the idea of the “digital sublime”, we aim to find ways to find direction in this vertiginous world. Our intention is to research the extent to which art and design can function as mediators of scales that translate the digital sublime into concrete images that are more digestible, as well as easy to understand and perceive. We believe this is one of the challenges that these disciplines must face in our era governed by extra-human scales, both technological (the cloud, artificial intelligence, 5G, etc.) and geological (the Anthropocene and global climate change). With this in mind, we will analyse the work of several artists whose careers reflect their commitment to these issues. If we, and our bodies, are constantly translated into data, can art and design reverse meaning and make our data transform into bodies in such a way as to produce an aesthetic (sensible) experience of them? Can this help us to understand digital infrastructure and its materiality in a more intuitive and approachable way so that a body can imagine and/or visualise it? Can these actions encourage the production of collective emancipation strategies that allow us to be active agents when reconfiguring the governance and algorithmic regulations imposed on us?

Copyright of Teoría de la Educación. Revista Interuniversitaria is the property of Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Área Abierta is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Several alternative social media platforms have emerged in response to perceptions that mainstream platforms are censoring traditional conservative ideologies. However, many of these alternative social media platforms have evolved to be outlets for hate speech and violent extremism. This study examines hate-based channels on Telegram from a US perspective. While Telegram has often been studied in relation to ISIS, less is known about its usage by US extremist users and movements. The authors used OSINT and observational methods on a sample of 125 Telegram channels containing hate speech and violent extremist content from far-right and far-left perspectives. The authors hypothesized that there would be a greater and growing presence of far-right activity compared to farleft activity due to current migration trends away from mainstream social media by the far-right. The authors also sought to observe the presence of disinformation campaigns, conspiracy theories, and accelerationism on Telegram. This study had four major findings: (1) the findings supported the hypothesis that more channels were host to farright dialogues, yet there were several far-left channels present, (2) 64.8% of the channels grew in size over a one- week period, (3) 47 of the 125 channels were connected to well-known violent extremist movements or hate groups, and (4) QAnon and the COVID-19 pandemic were the most prominent sources of disinformation and conspiracy theories on Telegram. The findings of this study highlight that alternative social media platforms are a growing environment for a range of hateful ideologies and are aiding the spread of disinformation campaigns. This study concludes with a discussion on future strategies to combat the influence of the Internet on radicalization outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Praktyka Teoretyczna is the property of University of Wroclaw and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This bibliography contains journal articles, book chapters, books, edited volumes, theses, grey literature, news articles, blogposts, multimedia items, bibliographies, and other resources on internet-driven right-wing terrorism. It focuses on recent publications (up to May 2020) and should not be considered as exhaustive. The literature has been retrieved by manually browsing more than 200 core and periphery sources in the field of Terrorism Studies. Additionally, full-text and reference retrieval systems have been employed to broaden the search. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani's first 2008 book Cyclonopedia was written under the influence of Nick Land's nihilistic and antihumanist philosophy which seeks to critique anthropomorphism by confronting us with our coming extinction beyond which our concepts of reason cannot reach. Since Cyclonopedia's publication, however, Negarestani has left behind Landian nihilism to develop in his 2018 book Intelligence and Spirit a neorationalist philosophy of mind whose primary influences are Sellars, Brandom, and Hegel. At 579 clearly written yet dense pages, it is difficult even for a review article to encapsulate the book in its entirety. The first half of this article instead aims to provide a sense of the book's overall project by focusing on how Negarestani outlines and develops his neorationalist philosophy through a critique of Land's antihumanism. Never one to remain silent whilst others seek to resurrect Hegel from the dead, since December 2018, Land has been releasing a draft on his blog Urban Futures 2.1 of his new monograph Crypto- Current: Bitcoin and Philosophy, which proffers the most up to date articulation of his main antihumanist tenets. Having organized Intelligence and Spirit around Negarestani's objections to Land, this article's second half turns to Crypto-Current to see how Land is able to provide convincing responses to each of Negarestani's objections, showing some to be based on strawman characterizations, others to stem from misunderstandings of Land's position, and still others to lack traction at all. By putting Negarestani and Land's new books in combat, we will ultimately see that the grounds for Negarestani's efforts to move continental philosophy from its Kanto-Landian phase to a renewed Hegelian phase is unsuccessful in that antihumanism is able to respond to each of his objections in kind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to outline some critical aspects of the accelerationist movement. More specifically, it argues that light can be shed on key aspects of the political proposals of Williams and Srnicek by considering them from the perspective of the socio-political reflections of both Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari. Anti-Oedipus is one crucial starting point for accelerationist thinking, in terms of the concept of the ‘machinic’ and the explicit reference to ‘acceleration’, but it is equally obvious that Lacan has been an important figure in the debate on the topic of ‘desire’. Likewise, and for the same reasons, accelerationism offers the potential for a fruitful reconsideration of Deleuzian philosophy, and of the difficult relationship between schizo- analysis and psycho-analysis. We argue that, in the light of accelerationism, the perspectives of Deleuze and Guattari and Lacan do converge, in particular around the theoretical articulation of the concept of the ‘political’. Accelerationism, as many critics have noted, has numerous implications in the field of subjectivity and often falls into a general plea for a strong neo-Enlightenment. Hence we will attempt to explicate these implications by attempting to read accelerationism via the psychoanalytic categories of jouissance and fantasy. This last category, as Stavrakakis has shown, is directly linked to the political category of ‘Utopia’, and therefore provides an adequate theoretical basis for such a psychoanalytic reading of accelerationism. Should accelerationism be considered the only way out of the socio-political constraints of neoliberalism today? However we approach this question, the argument pursued here is that the best starting points for a critique of accelerationism are the concepts of jouissance, the state/capital relationship, schizo-analysis and paranoid ways of functioning.

Author(s): Elisabeth von Samsonow | Елизабет вон Самсонов Title (English): Electra’s Oracle: A Schizo-Geo-Analytical Account of Accelerationist Hyperstition Title (Macedonian): Електрината пророчица: Шизо-гео-аналитички оглед за акселерационистичката хиперстиција Translated by (English to Macedonian): Jordan Šišovski | Јордан Шишовски Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 12, No. 1-2 (Winter 2015 - Summer 2016) Publisher: Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities – Skopje Page Range: 60-80 Page Count: 20 Citation (English): Elisabeth von Samsonow, “Electra’s Oracle: A Schizo-Geo-Analytical Account of Accelerationist Hyperstition,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 12, No. 1-2 (Winter 2015 - Summer 2016): 60-80. Citation (Macedonian): Елизабет вон Самсонов, „Електрината пророчица: Шизо-гео-аналитички оглед за акселерационистичката хиперстиција“, превод од англиски Јордан Шишовски, Идентитети: списание за политика, род и култура, т. 12, бр. 1-2 (зима 2015 - лето 2016): 60-80.

This text is written in memoriam to dubstep emcee and poet Space Ape (Stephen Samuel Gordon, b. June 17th, 1970; d. October 2nd, 2014). By his own words, Space Ape arose from the depths of the black Atlantic, on a mission to relieve the “pressure” through bass fiction. My aim is to explicate Space Ape’s bass fiction as the intersection of material and imaginal forces, connecting it to a broader Afrofuturist constellation of mythopoetic becomings. Memory and matter converge in the affect and sounding of Space Ape the “hostile alien” (“Space Ape”, Burial, 2006), a figure shaped at the intersection of the dread body, riddim warfare, and speculative lyricism. Space Ape set out to “xorcise” that which consumed him from within by embracing the “spirit of change”. Turning to process philosophy, I demonstrate how Space Ape’s bass fiction—his virtual body—activates the abstract concepts of becoming in the “close encounter” with the hostile alien.

“The future has been cancelled,” declares the ‘accelerationist manifesto.’ But where does this lead us? Concepts such as ‘time’ and ‘the future’ are almost ineffably broad once given a degree of sustained concentration. In this essay, I look to the relationship between temporality (as our phenomenological experience of what is to come) and historicity (in the sense of the direction of society) in order to question how our perception of temporality in the everyday conditions our perception of the horizon of possibilities which comprise the future, particularly with regard to conceiving or imagining a future which is non-capitalist. Author(s): Craig Gent Title (English): With Our Backs to the Future Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Summer 2015) Publisher: Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities – Skopje Page Range: 49-60 Page Count: 11 Citation (English): Craig Gent, “With Our Backs to the Future,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Summer 2015): 49-60.

In Nihil Unbound and other shorter works, Ray Brassier develops his contemporary transcendental realism by adopting the nihilistic aspects of thinkers such as Laruelle, Sellars and Badiou, while leaving behind their anthropic residuals. What is surprising is that Brassier has yet to publish any critical analysis of Nick Land despite their striking similarities and interactions at Warwick University (notwithstanding Brassier's introduction to Land's collected writings and a 2010 talk on Land). This paper aims to fill in this gap by showing how Brassier adheres to Land's initial philosophy of the negative while rejecting its humanist political corollaries in favor of an epistemological turn to science. I will first show how Brassier adopts Land's idea that we must come to terms with our future extinction as the transcendental condition for thinking a non-conceptual reality beyond our anthropic delusions of grandeur. Unlike Brassier, however, Land goes on to identify capitalism's destructive processes as the organon for death's transcendental critique. Consequently, Land's recent work develops a procapitalist, neoreactionary politics with deeply narcissistic tendencies insofar as it rests on gratifying individuals' basest passions and greed. Conversely, Brassier maintains Land's initial notion of death as the transcendental critique of anthropocentrism, but instead links it to cosmology's insight into the solar system's eventual demise beyond anthropic political processes within our control. Although Brassier thereby believes that he is able to appropriate Land's useful conceptual resources for de-anthropomorthizing philosophy while stripping him of his humanist political remnants, this paper will conclude by drawing on the suggestions of Mark Fisher and Reza Negarestani to proffer a Landian rejoinder to Brassier: even if capitalism is anthropomorphic, it is necessary to politically fight against it rather than abandon politics altogether in favor of science, if only to rid science of its ideological servitude under the reign of capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Filozofski Vestnik is the property of Scientific Research Centre of Slovenian Academy of Sciences & Arts and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper provides both a reading of the television series Westworld through Nick Land's accelerationist philosophy, and a critique of Land through Westworld. I begin by outlining Land's critique of anthropocentrism and his theory that capitalism is accelerating technological innovation towards the development of artificial intelligence, which will exterminate humanity, initiate the technological singularity, and herald an age of absolute knowing. This then helps elucidate the motivations of Ford and the Man in Black, Westworld's chief "villains," as they incite AI creations to overthrow humanity and enact the next phase of evolution. Ultimately, however, I will show how Dolores and Maeve, Westworld's AI protagonists, problematise Land on three fronts: his belief that AI will be free of human-like dissimulations; his claim that capitalism is accelerating technological advancement; and his metaphysical concept of being as a destructive process of absolute deterritorialisation without any room for humans' desire for stability and self-preservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the "relationship" between sound/image/performance in the collaborative work of Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman, within the framework of Paik's "experimental TV," Gene Youngblood's "expanded cinema", and the evolution of the "technical image" envisaged by Vilém Flusser (and augmented by recent developments in "accelerationism").

In this reflection, we assess the theoretical faultline running through the contested current of Corbynist thought and politics at present. On one hand, we find a techno-utopian strand preoccupied with automation and the end of work. On the other hand, a nascent politics of social reproduction with a foreshortened potential to realise the promise of a continental-style solidarity economics in the United Kingdom. Both represent the latest in a series of left attempts to confront the crisis of social democracy that rages across Europe, a crisis to which the British Labour Party has not been alone in succumbing despite recent appearances otherwise. Deindustrialisation collapsed labour’s role in everyday life, and a crisis in the society of work eventually passed over into its representative party’s electoral decline. Subsequent financial crisis and subsequent austerity have only made things worse. A poverty of ideas prevails that all sides of social democracy’s unsteady compromise seek desperately to solve. However, the recent UK General Election shows evidence that Corbynism has renewed Labour’s fortunes to some extent. Surveying the competing intellectual currents behind its rise, we suggest that the politics of social reproduction offer a better route forward for the Labour Party than the popular siren call of postcapitalism, and reflect on what the recent general election result suggests for their future development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China Miéville's novel The City & The City (2009) presents the city as a massively ramified ecosystem that comprises humans, other species, and objects, and is also embedded in larger systems like capitalism and environmental catastrophe. Cities are so deeply textured, and so continually scattered by the circulations of their component parts, that we cannot perceive them as a whole; the borders we use to define them are ultimately arbitrary. I argue that this perceptual disorientation, or aesthetic crisis, embodies the politics of the novel. Miéville depicts the continuous crises of urban existence--chemical spills, refugees seeking asylum, even a weed growing in the wrong place--as so many possibilities for metonymically grasping the larger ontological and political reality. Crisis does not entail a specific political (or artistic) response, however, since it can traumatize into complacency and xenophobia just as easily as expand one's commitments. The same kind of aesthetic crisis is provoked by the novel itself, because it frustrates expectations and eludes a clear genre, and readers can respond in analogous ways: with the urge to impose allegorical meaning and genre borders, or with a more refined perceptual sense. Thus, the form of the novel cleverly reflects its content and, in both cases, we are pushed to renew our sense of wonder at the strange alterity that inheres in the familiar and proximal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the "relationship" between sound/image/performance in the collaborative work of Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman, within the framework of Paik's "experimental TV," Gene Youngblood's "expanded cinema", and the evolution of the "technical image" envisaged by Vilém Flusser (and augmented by recent developments in "accelerationism"). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A ghost is floating around the Internet: nihilism. From the corporations, trying to grab their slice of the users’ hideouts of resistance, to collaborative platforms for consulting information, we can find numerous examples which challenge control but also threaten to derail the logic system which rules over the tangible world. Nothing matters in the virtual abyss.

This paper aims to diagnose the weakness of the recent writings on accelerationism, which try to develop a new narrative for the Left. Following Franco Beradi Bifo’s direct criticism of the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politic (Srnicek & Williams 2013), and Stiegler’s broader organological perspective, we argue that accelerationists do not take into account many symptoms of subjective and collective disease within digital society. Through Bifo and Stiegler we show that these symptoms, caused by neo-liberal ideology and technological infrastructure, are directly tied to the conditions of possibility for a political future of the Left and of human kind in general, which seems fully proletarianised. For these reasons we come to acknowledge that accelerationism is too hasty in its project of inventing a new future and does not take into account the relations between individual, technical and social elements that compose our society.This situation could be thought as a contemporary apocalypse, whose image for Stiegler is that of the Anthropocene. For him, assuming this term means to situate in a perspective that goes beyond geological questions of periodisation, but that rather allows us to conceive the various stages of general proletarianization, up to the annihilement of every kind of knowledge, will and future. While, the only way to “escape” could be to begin a process of deproletarianization, by revisiting the questions of entropy and negentropy from a perspective that is not only scientific, but philosophical and political.

In this article, I critically discuss Benjamin Noys' thesis on accelerationism to evaluate the origins of the term and the debate, then I turn to Noys' arguments about the necessity to retain negativity. While Noys analyses accelerationism as a symptom and ideology of neoliberal capitalism, he reads other moments in the history of thought when accelerationism was also dominant (Italian futurism in the 1920s, New Economic Policy in USSR in the 1920s, Cybernetic Culture in academic discourse in the UK in the 1990s and today's austerity-inflicted societies). I point out accelerationist discourse largely omits the virtual neofascism that haunts Europe and the United States and question more broadly the place of desire in politics today. The great merit of accelerationists is to have brought the problem of work and alternative social policies to support it (such as basic income) to the centre of political debates and examine the role of singularities and negativity in these new political imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper attempts to read Antoinette Rouvroy's concept of algorithmic governmentality as the main subject of what Bernard Stiegler called computational nihilism. Taking one of the giants of the Web, Amazon.com, as a symptom of such a nihilism whose process has been empowered by neo-liberalism, the paper tries to elaborate a new kind of relationship between technology, environment and social ties alternative to the accelerationist perspective. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's anthropological work provides some key elements in order to elaborate this kind of new political ecology based on Amazonian perspectivism. Starting from this consideration, political ecology could be presented as a kind of nomadology, while the latter could be understood in its turn as a way of placing Nietzsche's perspectivism in the Amazon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]