A Slow and Steady Guide to Decelerationism

Anyone trying to work out what they think about decelerationism, better hold their horses, take a deep breath, and slow the fuck down. The nature of decelerationism is to put on the brakes. It’s whole point is to disentangle itself from the trend towards speeding the collapse, towards a facile transhumanism, towards the linear conception of the future represented by the failed imagination that gave us limitless progress. Things may seem to be speeding up, but it is only because of the energy dissipating from the unravelment of empires decline. In other words, entropy, that will in time also slow down.

Continued decelerationism will break and brake in waves on the times terminal beach. Each time we move to slow down and decelerate it will be a little less urgent, we will already be going slower, because the big skyscrapers will have already fallen by then, and the rubble will have stopped bouncing. Even so there will still be plenty to sift through and we can make mosaics out of the wreckage. On the ragged staircase of decline, a variety of possible futures are already presenting themselves, but none of them are distributed evenly. The futures aren’t one thing and they have never been distributed evenly. That doesn’t mean dealing with the winding down of things will be easy, or coherent. But if you take a deep breath, it can be dealt with in ways that won’t add to the chaos, but instead bring aesthetic harmony into various parcels of the disrupted field.     
The pressure of time can be eased by taking a decelerationist view. It is okay to take some time to think. Time to think can’t be taken away from those who are willing to think. It’s one of those things that can never be taken away, but it has to be chosen. The hurried pace of haste that results in further reactionary decision making to deal with the rapidity of change during the unravelment may require, at times, quick reflexes. Yet decompression from the systemic forces is a viable strategy for coping with these temporal processes, and allows instead for responsive decision making. So is renouncing the need to pay explicit attention to the play-by-play grind of one exceptional detail after another. The late David Lynch reminded us that we shouldn’t  “worry about the world going by.” Instead, we should do our work. Hurried slapdash and slipshod work may very well have to be redone. All it leads to is slop. 

 So we might as well slow down and think about the work that is needed, not be compressed into further busywork and band aids. These are the exact kind of things the too-late capitalist system excels at and that we would do our best to bypass anyhow.

Philosophically, deceleration gives us access to the transcendental. Without absolute horizons, when the big crunch gives rise to another big bang, we realize that expansion and collapse are just part of the oscillating waveform of history. Shown in human life it is the child who is born, matures, declines, and dies only to be reborn. In terms of civilizations, it is the family that becomes a tribe or clan, who in turn give rises to a larger nation, perhaps even an empire, that then in turn, begins the process of disintegration, leading back to clans, tribes, and family. Seeds from one empire get replanted in the birth of new nations. The problem with our contemporary dilemma is that so many are stuck on the through line of thinking that suggests the arc of history bends towards a single inevitable singularity. Like phallic rockets penetrating the depths of space, this remains a fever dream fantasy for those who want to believe in heaven without the religion. 

A viewpoint of multiple lives and multiple civilizations that arise and fall in their own vast cycles of spiraling time that involutes as much as evolutes, allows for periods of deceleration, of slowing down. These allow us to take a longer view in the outward world, and a deeper view within the depths of our own psyches.

The fond suspicion arises that the public conversation of deceleration and slowing down in all things, from slow food to slow productivity is still just beginning. Long views allow us to think slowly, to take in details that otherwise might pass us by. Small remains beautiful. Those small details get ignored in the hyper-compression of time. Doing anything good, can take a long time, so we might as well start now. Events will just happen anyway. They punctuate the long spectrum of time that is our shared lives. If things seem out of control, even traumatic, its because we have forgotten how to listen to the memories of the past. They had their traumas too. It’s okay to take a break from the news, from the noose that cuts off circulation to the head, and instead contemplate the things that have already happened. They have much to teach regarding how to cope with and even thrive as the problems delivered by the failed promise of the new meet the rubber of reality.

The blast waves of the H-Bomb continue to haunt our memory, just as the promise of cheap limitless energy continues to radiate our frenzied dreams. One can’t have one without the other, and these dead ends are better left abandoned. Nuclear power subsidizes nuclear weapons, and as Sun Ra intoned, nuclear war is a motherfucker. Better to place our hopes in the natural nuclear reactions of the sun, and learn to live with less and within limits then the dual explosions that destroy the land, its creatures, its people. Plutonium nightmares with a long shelf life really do require us to slow down and think it over, rather than speed up and do things faster. Let the new clear dawn fade.

Even so, cybernetics will continue to have a lot to teach us. Each individual is a system containing smaller systems and embedded within larger systems. For decelerationism, the idea of the negative feeback loop continues to teach crucial lessons.

Deceleration doesn’t give one hoot about Karl Marx because it recognizes both communism and capitalism as both flawed. Both have led to techno-managerial elitism and the siphoning off of resources from the rest of the world and people by the 1%. Therefore we can just get on with our lives without having deal with Marx or his predecessor Hegel’s brain farts any further. They’ve stunk up the room for long enough as it is.

“Decelerate the progress” is an apt decelerationist motto. Progress hasn’t been everything it was hyperpresently hyped up to be.

Accelerationism, as such, was critically and theoretically formulated by Benjamin Noys. Let me repeat once again what he said about this idea of giving in to the fast flow of the future, and market forces, that has driven so much accelerationist thought:

 “… which is the revolutionary path? Is there one?—To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist ‘economic solution’? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to ‘accelerate the process,’ as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.”

This is like the idea of “changing the system from within” that so many people seem to wish to do, but have such a hard time doing, as the hippies who became yuppies might tell, if they remember at this point. This could be said to be part of the social aspect of recuperation. Recuperation is the process where the ideas of a counterculture get reabsorbed back into the dominant culture, spun back into the media spectacle in a way that can be considered as neutered or spayed, in other words, without any kind of life affirming fertility outside of feeding the corporate beast.

Accelerationism seems to accept all the flaws of capitalism, and relish in the idea of continuing to participate with all its consumerist perks, in order to “speed the collapse.”

Opting out on the other hand allows a person to tune in to other signals not being broadcast on approved portions of the social media spectrum. Or just tune into nature. Decelerationists are much more about the everyday terroir of ones own turf (i.e. bioregion) than territorialization, deterritorialization, or reterritorialization.

Another aspect of decelerationist thought that makes its adoption easier, is the ability for it to be put into practice by individuals. No one needs to rely on an institution to slow down, especially in their personal lives. The personal is political after all, is it not? Not adopting the latest platform or technology is a choice. The Amish have much to teach here, even if becoming Amish isn’t the goal. Learning to be a producer of things, rather than just a consumer, a user of things, is one way to not get used by the systems that have accelerated to a point beyond our liking.

With the accelerationists, it can be agreed that “there is no distinction to be made between the destruction of capitalism and its intensification. The auto-destruction of capitalism is what capitalism is,” according to author Nick Land. This realization however does nothing to help those caught in the throes of “capitalist realism” or what Mark Fisher thought of as the “pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.”

Breaking through that barrier does not require accelerating beyond the speed of sound, or light, or capitalism, but does require the ability to creatively opt-out, so that other economies and possibilities might once again be dreamed.

At the time of writing accelerationism is once again making the rounds among readers of a certain pomo crit lit tendency. The torch has been given to a new generation of thinkers who are seeking to resurrect it once again and see what use it might be put to, and this happening on both the left-channel, and the right-channel of the stereocentric bird brain of political ideation. They are spurred on by the promise, any day now, of space/time shattering quantum computers, virtual reality, AI, biohacking, cheap to free energy for all, and other bespectacled pipe dreams from the ongoing bromance with Silicon Valley. Decelerationism waits in the wings for those who think maybe things are speeding along just too much. A hand on the brakes isn’t a bad thing when you can’t see the scenery in the world that you live in.

As the false promises of cryptocurrency, quantum everything, better living through genetics and AI set in, as people grow bored of the metaverse and the ultimate Spectacle / Simulacra of virtual unreality set in, people will have to turn around and look to what came before, to tradition, to simpler technologies whose development we could have chosen, but didn’t. To walk away from this fetishization of techbrology and see what else we might do as a species is inevitable. 

As the process of winding down unfurls, any attempt to recover the lost sense of quality, craftsmanship and pride in the work of making things that last will find its own rewards. Quality is the greatest enemy to automatized AI machine creation. On the social level this means the renunciation of the cult of personal branding. The pleasures of private life are best enjoyed in private, not with the world watching through the filtered lens of social media. In the realm of culture this means a return from streaming television and the internet to the newspaper, radio, and the book. Most of all it means, moving from the feverish pace of ever accelerating change and fragmentation, to coherence and concentration, from wasteful extravagance, to simplicity and moderation.

​And if you are only now just putting on the brake, decelerationism won’t laugh, or say, it’s about time you slowed down. No one will even give you a ticket. It isn’t about policing the speed of degrowth after all, but settling into the natural rhythm, cadence and pace of its cycles.