Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pipo234 999 days ago
Accelerationism

Learned a new word today, thanks. Had to google that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism

Very depressing...

2 comments

Acknowledge the sadness, but fight the depression. Act. We can only do our best.
Indeed.

I think I recently heard Cory Doctorow phrase it like this: Both pessimists and optimists are essentially fatalists. Ie.: at the core it's more important to believe you can make a change, than to "know" what "will" happen.

That's Doctorow's prescription of hope rather than "optimism" or "pessimism".

Hope reserves agency.

Optimism and pessimism both presume an outcome regardless of action, and absolve responsibility.

As a counterpoint, Derrick Jensen's “Beyond Hope”: https://orionmagazine.org/article/beyond-hope/
That reminds me of Ashleigh Brilliant's aphorism: "I feel much better now that I've given up hope".

<https://www.ashleighbrilliant.com/book4.html>

That's more about hope as expectation than hope as possibility, I think. And that's certainly Jensen's vibe.

Thanks for the reference.

After reading it it, sounds like old fashioned Terrorism, coated under rose sugar flavors of right-wing pseudo intellectualism...