Accelerationists Just Wanna Have Fun
Reject both minimalism and maximalism—the only way out is through
“The thorn was a sacred Claw because all thorns were sacred Claws; the sand in my boots was sacred sand because it came from a beach of sacred sand.”
—Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun
How do you orient yourself long-term in an ever-changing environment?
In my circles, utilitarianism is out, and what remains is beauty. Human beings evolved the sense of awe as a signal that we’re moving in the right direction in high-dimensional space. Beauty is a pointer to health, abundance, and the pinnacle of existence.
When a normie learns this, they undergo one of two transformations. Most become ironic consoomers, partaking in everything and enjoying nothing.
Others recoil in horror at their surroundings, seeing for the first time the wretched environment that they’ve tolerated for so long. Understandably, they turn to the spiritual elimination diet that is minimalism and take Marie Kondo’s advice to destroy everything that doesn’t “spark joy.”
But irony and minimalism are two sides of the same coin. Whether you wrap yourself in a blanket of thoughtless consumption or put up shields to block out all ugliness, you’ve succumbed to what Ian Bogost calls ironoia—the distrust of everything.
As Simon Sarris and Riva Tez point out, there’s so much more to life than reading The Daily Stoic while waiting to die. We can be maximalists. We can RETVRN to a more beautiful world.
Or can we?
At Urbit Assembly in Lisbon, ~hastuc-dibtux and ~tondes-sitrym gave a talk titled Teleopunk – The Anarchitecture of Human Renovation. In it, they dropped some facts:
There is nowhere on the planet that you can hide from microplastics.
Your testosterone levels will never be as high as your grandfather’s.
You would have to eat eight oranges today to get the same nutritional value as one orange a hundred years ago.
And so on.
We criticize boomers about having intuitions that mismatch the current environment, but with the current rate of acceleration, this is true for most principles we call Lindy. No amount of slonking eggs or planting poppies will protect you from what’s coming. Genetic modification and artificial intelligence will pave over everything. Your sense of beauty is broken, and if you fail to recalibrate, you will perish like a dog.
Does this spark joy? As if God cares about your whims. Who made you the arbiter of what deserves to exist and what doesn't? Your sculptures and symphonies, your sourdough and squat racks, all nothing more than the human equivalent of shiny brown beer bottles forcing a masturbatory reflex. This is the ultimate black pill: you are a flesh automaton animated by neurotransmitters, and your moral compass points you down arbitrary roads that all lead to the goon cave.
The ultimate white pill is recognizing that arbitrariness is the greatest beauty there is.
The inability to appreciate games is a form of autism. "What's the point of a bunch of guys kicking a ball into a net? Wouldn't it be easier for them to use their hands?" No shit—the self-imposed difficulty is the whole point. Fun is what you get when you voluntarily engage with an arbitrary system on its terms, rather than evaluating it as a means to some higher end.
To what higher end would you aim for, anyway? It's a question with a recursive answer. You instrumentally tackle your chores so that you can tackle more chores. Theoretically, there will be a reward someday, a syringe of hedonism powerful enough to justify the slog. Sex, delicious food, maybe a trip to the Sistine Chapel, and your grindset reveals itself to be utilitarianism with extra steps.
Playing a game is not directly pleasurable in the way that eating food and having sex is. A game makes your life harder. Why do this to yourself? Because it’s fun, and fun is so much better than happiness. But the process doesn’t work if you question it. The second you start to think something is a waste of time, that it might not yield the rewards you crave, the fun disappears—hence why nihilists are so miserable.
To have fun is to recognize the arbitrariness of the game you’re playing and to give yourself over to it anyway, without reservation. Camus calls this the absurd; Bogost calls it play.
I call it adventure.
You explore caves not because of some theoretical treasure hidden inside, but because to see a cave and not explore it is wrong on a deeper level than you can articulate. In this same way, you should slonk eggs not because of a misguided belief in saving your soul from the flood of microplastics, but because slonking is good in and of itself.
We are right to do these things for far deeper reasons than "a jacked guy on Twitter said so." The spirit of adventure draws us to them helplessly, as the sun draws a tree to its zenith. To ensure that this spirit of adventure survives what is coming, we need only to trust in it.
This is the power of teleology.
In Super Mario World, you don't avoid Koopas because you hate them from first principles; you avoid Koopas because of the higher teleological pull of the game's objective. Surrendering to this pull unlocks a realization: Koopas aren't just obstacles. They're also springboards, projectiles, weapons. At masterful Kaizo levels of play, they're an extension of yourself.
Microplastics are Koopa shells in the Kaizo Mario level that is life in 2024. Avoid microplastics not because you hate them, but because you have chosen to play the game of getting jacked and glorifying your body. In this level, they’re an obstacle. In another level—or another game entirely—they could be springboards.
Every object contains secrets, if you're willing to trust it.
The bottles of Crisco sitting in Walmart are sacred, because everything is sacred. The simplest way to model this is to recognize that meaning exists not in our minds, but within the world itself—if you’re willing to trust it.
Effective accelerationism is this recognition.
“A fifteen-year-old boy on a mission trip to the Asian Pacific finds himself implicated in an international child porn smuggling case, via innocuous nudie pics and mandatory reporting laws. What was intended as a playful comment on an Instagram post becomes a crusade, a girl commits suicide because someone called her a slut. An offhand anime shitpost becomes a Japanese death cult. A student accidentally uploads a sub-sentient AI that uses his visual cortex as a bitcoin miner.”
—Liam Fitzgerald, A Zoomer Manifesto
How do you orient yourself long-term in an ever-changing environment?
The answer is: you can’t. All attempts to do so inevitably sand off the infinite edge cases that make life interesting. For centuries, Christian-flavored fascism accepted that trade-off in the name of order. But you can’t keep a lid on power forever—trying to suppress the coming chaos through social reform is no different from trying to do so via regulation and safety, and even the man himself has given up on that.
Does this spark joy? Wrong question.
A better question: what adventure awaits?
Effective accelerationism is the philosophy that embraces this adventure. It’s the recognition that attempting to turn time backwards is the height of arrogance, not merely on a logistical level, but on a metaphysical level that equates your current hedonistic preferences with the will of the universe.
It means not giving into irony through aversion or consumption, two sides of the same coin. It means treating your body like a playground. It means walking the thin line where you can genuinely enjoy mass media not under the delusion that it's a vessel for nuanced storytelling, but by unironically embracing it as the advertising vehicle that it is, and unlocking the opportunities for play that lie within.
I don't know where this takes us. That’s the point. Effective accelerationism is a mindset of faith—a mindset that says that if you trust the universe, the adventure that follows will be worth it.
It feels irresponsible to enjoy this piece uncritically, but I'm gonna throw caution to the wind today. Loved the ride👏
Great read 🔥