Punk Accelerationism
Description
Luo P/Acc:
"Based on the political economy analysis of data labor earlier discussed, when digital nomads — super-individuals oriented towards decentralized platform cooperation or anti-capitalist tech politics — conceive a form of punk accelerationism (P-Acc) in the following way:
Creators with a tech-political consciousness use web3/AI technology to control their data labor outcomes, preventing monopolization by tech giants. They form entrepreneurial communities with diverse skills, liberating creativity, driving projects through a platform cooperative model. They simultaneously establish democratic and autonomous digital nomad community networks worldwide, expanding individual data sovereignty to societal data sovereignty, promoting universal basic income, and fostering social justice.
Similar to punks, they release aggressive, escapist, and negating energy, disrupting existing technology-capital reproductive structures, improvising and creating possibilities for alternative technology routes on a daily basis, transforming corporate workers into digital nomads:
In the AI field, creating more technical interfaces to help ordinary creators; in the web3 field, developing more products that promote data sovereignty and assist community autonomy, instead of engaging in coin speculation financial games. Lowering the barriers to entry for workers to use these tools, making them as easily accessible as smartphones. Empowering more workers to reclaim their data production means.
Spreading tech-political awareness, establishing platforms for platform cooperation, public sociology, socialist feminism, ecological anthropology, and other sustainable theories.
Through the emancipated creators discussed above, breaking down disciplinary barriers, fostering open collaboration, encouraging cross-disciplinary integration, creating new forms of cooperation, and social relationship networks. Exploring entrepreneurial models that are less focused on capitalization, adopting a platform cooperative model, developing alternative technological infrastructure, and strengthening the positive feedback loop in the aforementioned steps.
Simultaneously, establishing democratic and autonomous digital nomad community networks worldwide. This is a complex, challenging, and controversial entrepreneurial process, involving post-colonial criticisms and self-critique, returns on family-social labor divisions, integration of local ethnic communities, and managing existing power dynamics. In daily practice, designing communal communities and public life artistry that accommodates both human and non-human residents."
Discussion
Luo/Acc:
"With the wave of AI agents triggered by ChatGPT, the concept of “super-individuals” has become popular. This concept can be seen as an advanced version of “digital nomads” and “slash youth” in the realm of AI.
“Super-individuals” can be defined as individuals who are proficient in multiple professional skills, detached from traditional employment relationships in companies, and independently engage in commercial activities for monetization. These individuals mostly master cutting-edge technologies, with AI tools serving as advanced productivity, Web3 tools shaping advanced production relations, and streaming media or the Metaverse acting as production domains. Super-individuals who establish profitable business models are then regarded as “one-person companies.”
From freelancers, slash youth, digital nomads, to super-individuals, all these are enticing but flawed promises for workers, as neoliberalism continues to construct increasingly extreme narratives of individual success. Completely free-flowing labor forces no longer strive for collective public welfare and social security. Instead, they rely on individual talent to drive profits, which is most favorable for the labor market under neoliberalism.
These narratives absorb the legacy of the 1960s youth cultural revolution and the resentment towards contemporary white-collar workers. Indeed, the majority of white-collar workers cannot seamlessly transition into digital nomads or super-individuals, as it requires the courage to face risks and the ability to stand alone. Quitting a job to chill for a while until savings run out, then returning to the office, is akin to a condensed version of the hippie history of the 1960s.
Decades of neoliberalism have led to the shrinkage of public welfare, extreme compression of labor remuneration rates, and a reduction in industry positions with excess profits. Being anti-office drone, anti-serf, quitting a crappy job become the prevailing youth ideology. “Lying flat” is a significant rejection of the biopolitics of capitalism. When politics no longer offers public solutions, work fails to sustain a respectable living, and the core family unit struggles to adapt to rapidly changing youth cultures. Breaking away from traditional institutions such as the state, corporations, and family, forsaking negotiation needs, losing publicness completely, also signifies the potential for establishing another form of publicness.
Digital Nomads — super individuals are keenly aware that neoliberal employment relationships constrain productivity and deplete vitality. Therefore, they cleanse themselves of the mundane and come ashore. Starting from Deleuze’s theory, digital nomads — super individuals are distinctly flag-bearers of de-territorialized individuals, seeking escape routes within outdated relationships, reassembling their own production relationships (web3) and production spaces (streaming media — remote work), utilizing the most advanced means of production (AI) to uncover creative potential.
Excluding the entrepreneurial path of capital reproduction, can this de-territorializing force lead to platform cooperation or anti-capitalist technological politics? In other words, how is it possible to reverse engineer the “super individual”?
Assuming that technologically conscious super individuals, through web3/AI technologies, hold exclusive data to avoid monopolization by tech giants and form entrepreneurial communities among diverse skilled super individuals, liberating creativity. By driving projects in a platform-cooperative manner while simultaneously establishing democratic autonomous digital nomad community networks worldwide, expanding individual data sovereignty into collective data sovereignty, and promoting universal Basic Income (UBI). Is this a potential pathway for the future?"
Could AI, web3, and the Metaverse become liberation machines for contemporary corporate warriors?
Luo P/Acc:
"In his article “Xu Yu: What Will Begin after the End of the Enlightenment Movement?”, the technology philosopher Xu Yu proposed an understanding of accelerationism: In physics, velocity is a vector that includes speed and direction. Velocity is displacement divided by time, speed is distance divided by time. Acceleration is velocity divided by time. Changing velocity no longer focuses on speed, but on changing the direction of velocity, becoming a more radical form of “acceleration” scheme — no longer limited by the speed of capitalist technological iteration, but by the vector speed brought by the diversity of the multiverse technology, leading to a pluralized future.
“We can change the direction of velocity, not just the magnitude of speed. From the perspective of time and technological development, how can technology be given a new framework and direction? In this way, we can also imagine bifurcation in the future, this bifurcation no longer leads to doomsday, but separates from the direction of doomsday and forms many branches. But what does providing a new framework for technology mean? To do this, we must rethink and study epistemological and knowledge-type problems systematically — inspired by the diversity of multiverse technology, or simply put, inspired by the historical and still effective technological diversity — thinking about how to reconfigure modern technology.”
Up to this point, the article has gone through a technological journey from contemporary artificial intelligence, blockchain, to early computers and the internet, hoping to explore a future-oriented technological political perspective, not just to commemorate forgotten, lost historical possibilities, but also to create the future in the present moment. The readers in front of the screen, the creators operating keyboards, mice, LCD screens, personal computers, phones, VR… These data labor tools all embody the escape and convergence of technological governance by generations of authors in the history of technology society. Each technological object is the result of the participation of various social forces and political visions. These technological objects have become data labor tools today, not only meaning that workers are incorporated into a new technological governance system, but also indicating the agency of each creator in the use of data labor tools. When each creator can consciously use the tools in their hands in every subtle daily life and collective action, they will form tiny rotational vectors of accelerationism, and after numerous tiny rotational vectors merge, they will shape new technological vectors pointing to the future, rotating the wheel of new vectors of cyberpunk accelerationism (P-Acc), guiding us towards a pluralistic future."