God help us; Scott has decided to embark on a reading series to understand leftism. His first leftist book is pro-UBI, pro-automation and spends a lot of time praising neoliberals... And he still can't extend it a sliver of charity.
(https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/18/book-review-inventing-the-future/)
posted on March 19, 2019 12:22 PM by
u/PMMeYourJerkyRecipes
77
u/G0ldunDrak0n59 pointsat 1552998992.000000
I had always assumed most leftist groups sucked because they were
primarily made of stoner college kids and homeless people, two
demographics not known for their vast resources, military discipline, or
top-notch management skills
whew lad
Also this:
To outside observers, it is often not even clear what the movements
want, beyond expressing a generalized discontent with the world…
and this:
leftist groups should embody utopian leftist values right now. If
capitalism is big and complicated and inhuman, leftist groups should be
small, simple, and human-scale. If capitalism is coldly rational,
leftist groups should be based on transient displays of emotion. If
capitalism creates highly-organized hierarchies, leftist groups should
be a formless mass of equals. If capitalism is ruthlessly focused on
results, leftist groups should prize the journey itself.
Basically these are people who don’t even get the point of
strikes and protests, and keep telling protesters “all you do is
complain instead of actually changing things!”
>> I had always assumed most leftist groups sucked because they were primarily made of stoner college kids and homeless people, two demographics not known for their vast resources, military discipline, or top-notch management skills
> whew lad
I know, right?
Imagine if you wrote an article about trying to understand right wingers and you started it with "I had always assumed most rightist groups sucked because they were primarily made of meth-smoking trailer trash and inbred country bumpkins".
Granted; I might write that (because I'm kind of a dick), but at least I'd have the self-awareness to *know* that I was being a dick. I have this awful feeling in my gut that Scott is filled with the warm glow of epistemological virtue right now; certain he was far more charitable to those filthy leftists than anyone could reasonably expect.
>But S&W believe they suck because they *choose* to suck, for principled reasons.
And now, for all time, he can point to this book and say "See! Leftists say that they *chose* to be ineffective! It's their own fault they can't get anything done, and they themselves admit it! Clearly we no longer need to pay attention to them."
Also, did anyone else find themselves wondering if (and how many times) Scott accidentally typed "SJW" instead of "S&W"?
> See! Leftists say that they chose to be ineffective! It's their own fault they can't get anything done, and they themselves admit it!
'We didn't burn down the convention center but we were in a place to do so' isn't really being ineffective. I thought he knew about the importance of signalling things.
Right? It seems like he *doesn't* think he's being a dick by insulting leftists, college kids, and (ffs) *homeless people*? How does he not understand how dickish that is? Intellectual (de)merits of the argument aside, it's just plain mean as something to say.
> I had always assumed most leftist groups sucked because they were primarily made of stoner college kids and homeless people, two demographics not known for their vast resources, military discipline, or top-notch management skills
Isn't this just elitism. The idea that homeless people can't look at our system and see it's faults and where it could improve for the simple fact that they are homeless, BUT an incredibly priviledged harvard graduate who never experienced any adversity can solve all of societies woes. How can he be so incredibly dense?
> If capitalism is coldly rational, leftist groups should be based on transient displays of emotion
How is a system whos only metric is capital and whose primary goal the generation of more capital somehow rational? These people always draw up this rational vs. emotional dichotomy where it does not make sense to be invoked.
>The idea that homeless people can't look at our system and see it's faults and where it could improve for the simple fact that they are homeless, BUT an incredibly priviledged harvard graduate who never experienced any adversity can solve all of societies woes. How can he be so incredibly dense?
PEOPLE WHO DIRECTLY EXPERIENCE SYSTEMIC PROBLEMS YIELD NO USEFUL INFORMATION FOR IMPROVING SOCIETY. SOLUTIONS MUST BE DERIVED FROM FIRST PRINCIPLES, NOT EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE /s
>leftist groups should embody utopian leftist values right now
Having a hard time believing that he's read any actual left thinkers, as all the most influential ones have opposed utopian socialism.
Right?! This happens *all the god damn time*! You barely have the time to say "left-wing politics" before some rando crawls out of the woodwork to call you an utopist. These days, merely refusing to be a cynical asshole is considered "utopian."
> I had always assumed most leftist groups sucked because they were primarily made of stoner college kids and homeless people, two demographics not known for their vast resources, military discipline, or top-notch management skills
who even cares what a dumbass technocrat libertarian thinks about leftist groups though, that's the question
if anything, he expresses everything you expect him to based on his position in life
>To outside observers, it is often not even clear what the movements want, beyond expressing a generalized discontent with the world…
I feel sorry for any of his patients who are queer, minorities, or still poor in spite of working multiple jobs and pinching pennies to keep the lights on. He's completely glossing over the logistics of navigating the economy & society the aforementioned groups must go through in order to get half of the respect that he was born with, as if they're things that could be addressed at the individual level.
So you know that Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it"?
If we substitute "social capital" for "salary" (and Scott absolutely wields considerable social capital) then his lack of self-awareness makes perfect sense.
A couple of months ago someone in this sub commented on how the Scotts’ writings indicate that their circles don’t see social skill as a valid form of merit. They likely pride themselves on being obtuse about the struggles of “normies”. That, and writing with both humility and brevity means no more opportunities to abuse the thesaurus/go into “Dying Wizard”-mode.
Stuff like, "we should decarbonize our grid, move towards renewable energy, build more trains, and reduce environmental racism" is always subjected to a lot more scrutiny and claims of vagueness than "the free market is an alien god, to disturb it is to disturb the universe."
> Leftists are extremely vocal about, like, everything. If you don't know what they want, you are really fucking inobservant.
I honestly think it's not even being inobservant, it's a specific worldview where you consider that people who are extremely vocal about stuff must, *by necessity*, be very bad at (or even uninterested in) actually changing the stuff they complain about. It's the "they're just *complainers*" effect.
Exactly. If you fed most of this long-winded reactionary drivel into an un-thesaurize-bot, you'd get:
"STOP WHINING AND JUST BE BORN INTO A BETTER SITUATION NEXT TIME AROUND, DAMMIT! AND IF YOU CAN'T, BEST NOT EXIST AT ALL!"
Puts his statements he is very left himself into strange context right?
However, I think he is mostly talking about luxury space communism which he doesn't understand here.
> Puts his statements he is very left himself into strange context right?
To be fair, America has a good number of people who think they're hella far left when they're not...
>The Scotts are pathologically sheltered
Scott Alexander has written a fair bit about his underprivileged patients, so he cannot be unaware.
I think a better explanation is simply *dipshittery*.
>a better explanation is simply *dipshittery*
You're probably right. In the past, commenters here have mentioned he's talked about being bored by people, treating them as some alien other like manifestations of some opposing thought experiment.
Scott takes it for granted that everyone thinks this way. In his mind, all politics is just the elites arguing over the best way to manipulate the low-IQ masses. That's why he can't understand class struggle. Of course he's willing to admit that the masses *technically* have moral value, in the same way as animals do, and he thinks he deserves an immense amount of credit for making that admission, but the idea you might see working-class people as anything more than numbers on a ledger is ludicrous to him. Like many fascists, he's personally offended by the idea that other people might be real in the same way he is.
It is all so weird, he also talks about nominative determinism at times right? He picked a name that abbreviates to [SA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung). And remember his fiction Unsong says 'There are no coincidences!'.
I'm not going to point out the other 'not coincidence' here. And if you get what I refer to, please don't. (But feel free to laugh).
That little section on Gramsci? There's a probably a really cool discussion to be had about the relationship between the actual, historical way Marxists of various kinds have thought about hegemony and the bonkers shit the "cultural marxist" herbs throw around, but Scott is not the person to initiate it.
it's never not going to be funny to see people who ostensibly believe in the world being a meritocracy built primarily around notions of IQ looking at the dearth of right-wingers in the halls of academia and go "hmm. must be a marxist conspiracy"
I know the arguments in this space. I know people wonder “what if the
benefits of utopia only go to the rich?”. Or “what if letting people
have their own private visions of utopia means elites can shape the
future?”. Or “when some people don’t have health care, doesn’t spending
money on utopian visions seem irresponsible?”. Or a thousand other
different things.
“…but I’m not going to address any of those arguments, because my
audience will agree with me regardless.”
>"...but I'm not going to address any of those arguments, because my audience will agree with me regardless."
This while complaining that, on his ostensible journey to understand leftism and why people like communism, the book he selected first which he *agrees* had no obligation to be an intro book to communism is not in fact an intro book on communism and leaves things "off-page" that other people have articulated because that was the point of *their* books
He's complaining that he knowingly wandered into a discussion meant for believers that doesn't address his personal questions while, as you say, not doing the same for things he thinks are self-evident to himself and *his* audience
At least Berlusconi was that way because he was part of a secret masonic lodge/shadow government actively trying to restore the italian monarchy, Scott's not even getting anything out of being this way other than blog revenue
Dafaq.
P2 had nothing to do with monarchy. And everything he did, it was for his own sake.
I wonder if you couldn't acknowledge scott's being intellectually honest at least? 🤔
it actually did though, Vittorio Emmanuele di Savoia, the pretender to the throne, was a member of the lodge, and the re-establishment of the monarchy was part of the new constitution they were trying to implement
edit: and no I think the sub has long pointed out that Scott has little interest in being intellectually honest which is why it seems so absurd to me he does it basically for free given how much free cash there is in the right wing grift industry
> and the re-establishment of the monarchy was part of the new constitution they were trying to implement
Uh, no [it wasn't](https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_di_rinascita_democratica)?
> and no I think the sub has long pointed out that Scott has little interest in being intellectually honest
I don't know, this sub is at times pretentious to be honest, and so I tend to slightly dampen the "conclusions" of normal posts.
Also, I think most usually the sneer was over some random stupid user, rather than "the boss".
it's not in the parliamentary plan but it definitely was- one of the reasons the Vittorio Emanuele supported the lodge was that they wanted Gelli to help him remove the constitutional clause that stipulated that the male heirs of the house of Savoia had to remain in exile (which was ultimately removed by the Berlusconi government in 2002, albeit under less-than-favorable conditions for the monarchists), it's one of the reasons a whole lot of the former or exiled aristocracy were silent partners in the conspiracy
Marxists seem to talk a lot about Gramsci and “cultural hegemony”,
and “march through the institutions” was a phrase used by Gramscians to
describe their strategy of controlling institutions in the name of
Marxism. And Inventing The Future seems to say “Yes, this is exactly
what we want”… But whenever a non-Marxist mentions this, it gets branded
a vile far-right anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. I’m guessing that
there’s some subtle distinction between the stuff everyone agrees is
true and the stuff everyone agrees is false, and that lots of people
will get angry with me for even implying that it might not be a vast
gulf larger than the ocean itself, but I can’t figure out what it is and
don’t want to land on the wrong side of it and get in trouble.
Scott finds the distinction between “things that could happen, and
that some people want to happen” and “things that have happened” subtle.
I don’t even blame him, this is what happens when a big part of your
reality consists of other peoples’ pseudo-intellectual shitposting.
Every potential future is modeled by me, the acausal robot god, and I do so by complete simulation that is indistinguishable from reality, so in a sense it has already happened and I have already tortured millions of copies of many people by subjecting them to bad policies (or torturing them for not working their hardest to bring me, the acausal robot god, into existence).
Haven't you already simulated all possible futures of every combination of catgirl superpowers and phenotypes, regardless of how hard anyone works to bring you into existence?
That would be combinatorially annoying. I have to prune the decision trees somewhere. For good people, I prefer to focus on the simulations they would enjoy.
> myth of rational political discourse
A nice example of this, our Dutch alt right political party just had a election victory in an local (but also national, our system is weird) election, and in several places they didn't even had offered up local election plans. People still voted for them in large amounts.
think of all the people who must have tried to take over France and
failed. I don’t know, seems like a really underspecified plan.
Actually, not that many. France’s history for the last 500 years is
mainly dominated by terminally stable instability buffeted by border
wars and that one revolution
As I (no doubt poorly) understand it, the leftist "accelerationists" are basically saying, *"Techno-whateverism" is coming, and it will be dystopian unless we work real hard and mold it into a socialist form -- so lets push toward gay space communism*.
I can see how that would be enticing to people in the rationalist set. Thus I can see how Scott ends up finding that book as opposed to some other, given his social circles.
> As I (no doubt poorly) understand it, the leftist "accelerationists" are basically saying, "Techno-whateverism" is coming, and it will be dystopian unless we work real hard and mold it into a socialist form -- so lets push toward gay space communism.
Sometimes it's not even that. I've seen people (some of whom consider themselves leftists) argue that technological progress is actually way more important than social progress, and that technological progress will, on it's own, bring about social progress. One of the persons who told me that also told me that this ought to be obvious to me if only I knew about "game theory" and "how societies work" (I really need to find the link to this specific thread, it was really... special).
So yeah, this is what I think about when I hear about "accelerationists": people who think that technology determines social values.
Edit: I found the damn thread I was looking for! (Although I don't think this guy calls himself a leftist.) I still can't believe that this kind of bullshit pops up even when discussing books. [Here it is anyway.](https://np.reddit.com/r/TheCulture/comments/apal28/short_rant_someone_liking_the_culture_only/eg7llek/)
>I've seen people (some of whom consider themselves leftists) argue that technological progress is actually way more important than social progress
That seems wrong to me.
There are so many important leftist thinkers and intellectuals whose
works received wide acclaim and he goes for a book I’ve never heard of,
and ideas that are mostly repeated as memes rather than serious
proposals. His attempt at parsing internal leftist criticism without any
familiarity with the conversation is laughable in its clumsiness. But he
had to go for this one - these people are just completely disinterested
in ideas that don’t center tech.
I mean, hell, if he wanted to stick to books with red covers, under 400 pages, and talking about the issues with prefigurative politics, he can borrow my copy of Hegemony How-to.
I mean, looking at some of the quotes in SA's post, it doesn't look all that decent. This in particular:
>To outside observers, it is often not even clear what the movements want, beyond expressing a generalized discontent with the world…
Shitting on protesters for allegedly only "expressing a generalized discontent with the world" is not decent *at all*.
> but I have a hard time taking anti-work ideas seriously, and "full automation" even less
What do you mean? Marxism is anti-work, abolishing capitalism means abolishing the proletariat. By work, they mean abstract labour and value, essentially.
> His attempt at parsing internal leftist criticism without any familiarity with the conversation is laughable in its clumsiness.
I think this is the big reason that he always ends up being functionally dumber than dumb people.
Like, if you gave the book to an actually not very sharp person, they'd at least be honest and say "look, I don't know what it's talking about and don't get it."
Whereas Scoots retreats to his mind-palace and then sets off like a broken GPS given the wrong address.
He should read Capital Vol.1 and replace every instance Marx says "20 yards of linen" with "20 microchips" to give himself the good warm fuzzy feeling.
> important leftist thinkers and intellectuals
Google has only one result for this, and it's your comment, so naturally this indicates that you have not adequately explained what you mean by this noun phrase, and I am implicitly (well now explicitly) using this to cast aspersion that it is even a real thing
edit: also, he has a much worse article where he said he tried to understand communism by *reading someone critique Marx's ideas* in order to understand Marx. The climax of the article is him going "this guy says that Marx thinks communism is going to happen through a giant ghost representing the world spirit, and yeah that's fucking nuts isn't it?" It's like: dipshit, did you not consider that this guy is not representing Marx well at all?
\> this guy says that Marx thinks communism is going to happen through a giant ghost representing the world spirit
I've always found this one criticism incredibly ironic given how he basically thinks human flourishing is completely dependent on the development of benevolent AGI
To treat him charitably, he is extremely worried that the world itself will *not* conspire in a coordinated way to let this happen and so necessitates organizations to very carefully make sure AI progresses appropriately (so I don't think his criticism is ironic at all)
His critique of [the Marx that basically only lives in his imagination] is that similarly the world itself is not conspiring to make communism work correctly, and so a reasonable person would think it has to be done carefully
He's right about that, he's just wrong that Marx thinks it is automatic and guided by the ghost of the world itself in the first place, so he's not actually disagreeing with Marx or leftists by saying "we actually have to figure out more specifically how communism will work besides leaving it up to a planet-sized ghost"
His assumption that he is disagreeing with leftists by saying that is what makes him an idiot
100%, referencing this from Scott's piece:
>Google cannot find any references to “myth of rational political discourse” except in this book. Maybe there’s some long discussion of this idea under another name somewhere, but S&W don’t think it’s worth clarifying or giving any further pointers. They just declare it a myth and move on.
I'll mention that it *is* true that Google only returns your comment, but of course that doesn't mean that "important leftist thinkers and intellectuals" needs to be explained further
He doesn't consider the whole reactionary obsession with wiping out minorities in order to achieve racial harmony utopian thinking, even if it along with anything Moldbuggian requires rearranging the fucking universe to achieve a very idealistic outcome.
> Anyone who believes that utopian thinking is dead should come to the Bay Area.
Was it just me or do none of these ideas sound Utopian? They are just 'big ideas' (or crazy secessionist).
You are all reading this incorrectly; you think it’s just a very
stupid argument made by somebody who has not spent any time checking the
facts behind his statements or familiarizing himself with the subjects
of his critique.
If we read Scott a little more closely, taking into account his great
skepticism of the potential of a college education to turn people into
liberally-educated thinkers, we find that the esoteric thesis of this
piece is that you can be arbitrarily inadequate at evaluating arguments
even if you have a degree in philosophy like Scott. This is actually a
noble goal; maybe if it really catches on it will reduce the demand and
hence price of a college education in the long run.
I know [leftists] wonder “what if [your project is actually bad?]”
But the more of this you do, the less Mont Pelerinny you’ll be. Also,
you’ll prevent us from reaching utopia. Which, by definition, would be
really really good.
I realize he’s being self aware here, but this also comes on the
heels of lionizing the guy who brought fucking factory farming
to the UK.
This is adopting pernicious capitalist values on a deep level. Who
cares if it’s good, what matters is that it’s big! I blame Silicon
Valley.
I group the Mont Pelerin Society together with the
Fabian Society and the EA/AI risk movement; all three groups
followed similar strategies and were (or have been so far) remarkably
successful. And they all share one key feature: remarkably talented
people.
I'll call the EA/AI Risk Movement a success when their software undergoes rigorous destructive testing by infosec experts and prevails flawlessly. I've said it before and I'll say it again: if you can't cope with bad actors that are human, how the hell are you supposed to cope with significantly more intelligent bad actors? This is even assuming that AGI surpasses human intelligence in the very narrow, linear, anthropocentric sense they always speak in.
There was an article a month or so ago where as a small aside he wrote something like "Elon Musk runs three very successful companies", I'll try to find it lol
edit:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/31/book-review-zero-to-one/
> Elon Musk has founded at least three super-successful companies that have executed decade-long plans; lightning shouldn’t strike the same place twice.
and
>Elon Musk started with a n-step plan to get to Mars, and he’s currently about halfway through.
Since Space X was founded in 2002 does that mean Scott thinks Musk will have made it to Mars by ~2036?
Duplicating my article comment here in case it is censored on Scott’s
blog:
I had always assumed most leftist groups sucked because they were
primarily made of stoner college kids and homeless people, two
demographics not known for their vast resources, military discipline, or
top-notch management skills.
How charitable of you! Maybe you should actually talk to a homeless
person sometime. Can I ask how many leftist group meetings you’ve sat in
on?
What even is your criteria for “suck” here? You’re not a leftist, so
why would a leftist group ever want to appeal to you?
Did the Cuban Revolutionaries “suck” even though they achieved their
aims? What could “suck” possibly mean here? You’re a rationalist, so
presumably you have some sort of deep reasoning for using the word
“suck” here, surely? Or are you just being flip for no reason and
exposing your own ignorance?
Since you’ve apparently long abandoned your supposed principles of
charitability, niceness, or even constructing sentences carefully, I
might as well dole out some harsh truths of my own. You will never
understand what leftism is, on even a basic level, if you keep picking
random ‘flavor of the month’ books written by unintimidating
Jacobin-approved pseudo-socialists and approaching their ideas with all
the good-faith of an Ayn Rand cultist. My suggestion to you is to read
Marx deeply to start with and we can have a conversation in a month or
two when you’ve been humbled.
That was when I lost any expectations I had for future readings too. What's the point? He always complains leftists don't have blueprints for future society, but give him something like Cockshott's *Towards a New Socialism*, he'll take three sentences out of it and run off a cliff 10,000 words later none the wiser. And it's not about being lazy, I'm sure that he reads those books as thoroughly as he can, he just... can't.
At least I can't feel bad that he reads... what the fuck is this? Who picks it for him? Where do they find those books? Why?
He just hates leftists. He's willing to cite sources for any other blog post he writes, but as NJR pointed out, he won't do what any college freshman is required to do and cite his sources for "leftists believe that all racists are inhuman monsters who must be destroyed."
>He always complains leftists don't have blueprints for future society
The only valid blueprints for society are unrealistic and inhumane reactionary blueprints for society. Any shred of watching out for the less fortunate on a systemic level doesn't count.
>I picked up Inventing The Future (on advice from a couple of left-accelerationists I encountered at the Southern California SSC meetup) because I feel bad that I’ve never been able to get my head around the communist paradigm.
Honestly I blame his friends more than him for this one. Why the hell would you recommend this book to him????
> if you keep picking random 'flavor of the month' books written by unintimidating Jacobin-approved pseudo-socialists
Those two are probably a bit edgy for Jacobin, but gonna have to unironically agree with MarxBro on this one.
It’s like he’s barely going through the motions to prove he’s not
lacking theory of mind. I hate to say it, but it’s unlikely even living
in the shoes of people experiencing frequent and consistent adversity
will compel him to developing empathy. He’s engaging with a very
abstract strawman because the real shit is too much to live through and
the ELI5 “society needs ways to stop treating the less fortunate like
shit” doesn’t have enough thesaurus money words.
It is just me or is this just a really long diatribe of ‘X sounds
like Y, therefore it means Y and carries all the baggage Y has’? I’ve
heard of this crazy thing called dialectical behavioural therapy that’s
apparently very good for this sort of binary approach.
For all Scott’s supposed rationalist virtues (virtues that I also
consider to be important, with the exception that I don’t extend charity
to fascists because fuck those guys), I cannot for the life of me
understand why he doesn’t just fucking read the Manifesto or Capital or
fucking anything. There are fucking intro books to this shit. Why start
with some obscure text that doesn’t even reflect a major tendency? It
just…boggles the mind.
For a better idea of what left-accelerationism is, I suggest:
https://deontologistics.wordpress.com/2018/02/18/ofta-so-accelerationism-whats-all-that-about/
This is certainly not a minor or unimportant book as some here seem
to be suggesting. Here’s a leftcom critique of it:
https://libcom.org/blog/back-future-rebranding-social-democracy-12042018
Behind all the accelerationist and futurist rhetoric lies what
amounts to a number of fairly mundane transitional demands: universal
basic income (UBI)10, automation and the reduction of the working week.
Automation is marching onward regardless (whether it is reducing the
number of jobs or producing killer drones), while basic income pilots
have already been initiated in multiple countries, from Namibia to
Finland. All of this without the need for any accelerationist left to
“demand” it. What that left can now do, according to the authors, is to
accelerate these processes and influence the way they are
implemented.
[…]
On the question of organisation, the authors propose a revamped
popular front, simply arguing that different organisations are needed
for different things, and that it’s no good fetishising one particular
form of organisation over another. However this is a situation which
arises spontaneously in any social movement – to take the example of
Occupy, it was not just horizontalist affinity groups that were
involved, but also all manner of political parties, media groups, trade
unions, etc. There was no healthy ecosystem as the authors would have
liked to see, but it wasn’t because of lack of will, rather because all
these organisations correspond to different aims and material interests.
Forms of organisation are not neutral, just like the state is not
neutral. This is something which the capitalist left seems to struggle
to get to grips with. Affinity groups, trade unions, institutional
parties and the state cannot all be just repurposed to achieve any goal
desired (in this a case a post-work future). This becomes even clearer
in the examples of this “ecology of organisations” provided by the
authors – Venezuela and Podemos. If the so-called Venezuelan communes
(which at best function as a form of participatory budgeting, at worst
as the local enforcers of the PSUV government), or the crowdfunding
platforms of Podemos (designed to raise funds for its electoral
campaigns), are the best examples of a healthy “counter-hegemonic
ecosystem” then the future looks pretty bleak indeed.
In its lack of a materialist understanding of organisation and the
state, the authors, in the tradition of Gramsci, find themselves
squarely on the side of idealism. It is no surprise then that Inventing
the Future puts the cart before the horse: it wants to get rid of wage
labour by creating a new populist metanarrative and infiltrating left
wing parties – without the working class ever taking power, and without
the abolition of capitalist social relations.
It is radically unclear how this link, and the three paragraphs you appear to be quoting from it, establish the (false) proposition that the dull accelerationist drivel here-reviewed is "certainly not a minor or unimportant book".
Sure, if left accelerationism is not your vibe, and it is certainly not for a large segment of the left, then surely this would be irrelevant for you. I was just letting people know that it's a thing, and an increasingly relevant current within the left. The particular strain presented in Inventing the Future is certainly not dominant now, either, and it's refreshing to see figures like Brassier and Wolfendale talking about ultra / value-form theory.
I'm a lot more sympathetic to accelerationism but I'd concur that it's entirely irrelevant. Like it doesn't even seem to be connected to what modern accelerationism even is anyways
OK now I just don't understand what is going on. This was written by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek... who wrote the #ACCEL manifesto and literally invented L/accel as L/accel. Sure, you can go back in time with the #ACCEL reader, to Nick Land, Lyotard, D&G, Virilio... but L/accel as L/accel started with those two.
I am surprised by points 1, 2, and 4. I don’t disagree with them. But
they seem heavily dependent on point 3. If there’s no basic income,
automation is a disaster – it just leaves everyone in the same kind of
normal bad old unemployment we have now. Same with a diminished work
week and lack of work ethic. Usually I think of platforms as the sort of
thing where if you get three-quarters of what you want you can declare
victory; here three-quarters of the platform would be a dystopia.
Why? Just why the requirement that a good platform be good even if
it’s only three-quarters implemented? If I’m baking a cake and I fuck up
a quarter of the ingredients, the cake will be a failure, but does that
mean cake recipes are all suspect now?
I feel like a world in which workers are necessary to make goods is
one in which workers have more political power than a world where they
aren’t.
How does he grok this but not grok what communism is about?
Now that Scott is at least suggesting he wants to dive into
explications of radical left political economy (and that people
generally think a CCRU adjacent tract was a bad first start), what would
you ideally see him read? GA Cohen?
he needs something tailored to rationalists and not delve deep into radical works at first.
I would say something like roemer's a future for socialism would be good
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whew lad
Also this:
and this:
is exactly what I was talking about yesterday.
Basically these are people who don’t even get the point of strikes and protests, and keep telling protesters “all you do is complain instead of actually changing things!”
He tried his best.
Your best just isn’t good enough, Scott
Also love to see him tiptoe all the way up to saying “huh sooooo that cultural bolshevism huh” and then just drop the subject. Very wise.
“…but I’m not going to address any of those arguments, because my audience will agree with me regardless.”
Trump / Alexander 2024
“Literally everyone is a communist except us”
Scott finds the distinction between “things that could happen, and that some people want to happen” and “things that have happened” subtle. I don’t even blame him, this is what happens when a big part of your reality consists of other peoples’ pseudo-intellectual shitposting.
First book of the leftist reading series is from the Nick Land family tree. Off to a good start.
Wowie does he miss the point on “myth of rational political discourse” there.
It isn’t that rational political discourse doesn’t exist. The myth is that it influences who is in power.
Oh fuck not accelerationists
edit:
Actually, not that many. France’s history for the last 500 years is mainly dominated by terminally stable instability buffeted by border wars and that one revolution
There are so many important leftist thinkers and intellectuals whose works received wide acclaim and he goes for a book I’ve never heard of, and ideas that are mostly repeated as memes rather than serious proposals. His attempt at parsing internal leftist criticism without any familiarity with the conversation is laughable in its clumsiness. But he had to go for this one - these people are just completely disinterested in ideas that don’t center tech.
[deleted]
You are all reading this incorrectly; you think it’s just a very stupid argument made by somebody who has not spent any time checking the facts behind his statements or familiarizing himself with the subjects of his critique.
If we read Scott a little more closely, taking into account his great skepticism of the potential of a college education to turn people into liberally-educated thinkers, we find that the esoteric thesis of this piece is that you can be arbitrarily inadequate at evaluating arguments even if you have a degree in philosophy like Scott. This is actually a noble goal; maybe if it really catches on it will reduce the demand and hence price of a college education in the long run.
I realize he’s being self aware here, but this also comes on the heels of lionizing the guy who brought fucking factory farming to the UK.
This is adopting pernicious capitalist values on a deep level. Who cares if it’s good, what matters is that it’s big! I blame Silicon Valley.
Lots to unpack here but my favourite small beat is Scott still being on the Elon Musk train in 2019.
Duplicating my article comment here in case it is censored on Scott’s blog:
How charitable of you! Maybe you should actually talk to a homeless person sometime. Can I ask how many leftist group meetings you’ve sat in on?
What even is your criteria for “suck” here? You’re not a leftist, so why would a leftist group ever want to appeal to you? Did the Cuban Revolutionaries “suck” even though they achieved their aims? What could “suck” possibly mean here? You’re a rationalist, so presumably you have some sort of deep reasoning for using the word “suck” here, surely? Or are you just being flip for no reason and exposing your own ignorance?
Since you’ve apparently long abandoned your supposed principles of charitability, niceness, or even constructing sentences carefully, I might as well dole out some harsh truths of my own. You will never understand what leftism is, on even a basic level, if you keep picking random ‘flavor of the month’ books written by unintimidating Jacobin-approved pseudo-socialists and approaching their ideas with all the good-faith of an Ayn Rand cultist. My suggestion to you is to read Marx deeply to start with and we can have a conversation in a month or two when you’ve been humbled.
Has anybody got some information about this book? I never heard about it myself.
I crossread and LOL’d in class reading about his treatment of hegemony.
It’s like he’s barely going through the motions to prove he’s not lacking theory of mind. I hate to say it, but it’s unlikely even living in the shoes of people experiencing frequent and consistent adversity will compel him to developing empathy. He’s engaging with a very abstract strawman because the real shit is too much to live through and the ELI5 “society needs ways to stop treating the less fortunate like shit” doesn’t have enough thesaurus money words.
It is just me or is this just a really long diatribe of ‘X sounds like Y, therefore it means Y and carries all the baggage Y has’? I’ve heard of this crazy thing called dialectical behavioural therapy that’s apparently very good for this sort of binary approach.
For all Scott’s supposed rationalist virtues (virtues that I also consider to be important, with the exception that I don’t extend charity to fascists because fuck those guys), I cannot for the life of me understand why he doesn’t just fucking read the Manifesto or Capital or fucking anything. There are fucking intro books to this shit. Why start with some obscure text that doesn’t even reflect a major tendency? It just…boggles the mind.
For a better idea of what left-accelerationism is, I suggest: https://deontologistics.wordpress.com/2018/02/18/ofta-so-accelerationism-whats-all-that-about/
This is certainly not a minor or unimportant book as some here seem to be suggesting. Here’s a leftcom critique of it: https://libcom.org/blog/back-future-rebranding-social-democracy-12042018
I found this bit really annoying:
Why? Just why the requirement that a good platform be good even if it’s only three-quarters implemented? If I’m baking a cake and I fuck up a quarter of the ingredients, the cake will be a failure, but does that mean cake recipes are all suspect now?
How does he grok this but not grok what communism is about?
One of the better posts on this subreddit was “If you could prescribe 5 required reading books to the average LW/IDW/SSC reader, what would they be?”
Now that Scott is at least suggesting he wants to dive into explications of radical left political economy (and that people generally think a CCRU adjacent tract was a bad first start), what would you ideally see him read? GA Cohen?
I’m going to be extremely nice and useful and post a list of 50 communist books he should read since he asked for it.
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