Today I decided for some reason to check Twitter, where I was met with a rando trying to bait me into a slapfight online over presumably my accelerationist writings and beliefs. Setting aside the absurdity of nipping at the heels of some nobody fringe politics blogger who basically never uses mainstream social media, it made me think of how often it feels like I can't exist anywhere online anymore without someone being guilty of similar behavior. I try to go onto an imageboard whose name I won't mention but which is focused mainly on technical subjects, and it's filled with unmedicated paranoiacs screeching about how trannies are secretly behind Rust (the programming language's) success and influence. I try to use fedi and pretty much every other post is either the same inane queer and radlib anarchist posts that I have become numb to because I just can't escape seeing it, or people trying to counter it with imageboard reject fascist larping. Or worse yet, it's the same exact type of deranged larpy bullshit I encounter on Twitter affecting everything on fedi, such as a recent occurrence of someone on fedi being harassed by weird larper anarchists conflating shitposts about Italian-Americans with anti-blackness (I can't believe I'm even saying that). Other than the last thing, which is worse, none of this is as absurd as the scenario I started with, but nevertheless, I feel the need to address the people who are guilty of this sort of behavior.
I just have to say that I find it immensely sad and pathetic how obviously pretty much everyone has absolutely no faith in the ideas they claim to support and believe in. They know that the established neoliberal order which can imitate and recuperate any politics or identity group or whatever is never going to be defeated, that the planet is going to continue to be stripped bare of its resources so that the ultra-rich can continue to hoard wealth like dragons and eventually make some idiotic failed attempt at colonizing Mars. Everyone to some extent is probably aware that every single politics has utterly failed to be effective at anything, and that believing in anything has never won anybody anything. But rather than use this as an opportunity to question why every politics has pretty much failed, right or left, people continue to remain in denial about the rules of the game that they're playing and instead imagine that things are otherwise. They play pretend on the internet, make big ideological spectacles out of everything where the things that people post online – you know, like how they're baited into posting online by social media companies in order to drive up engagement and subsequently have more data to sell to companies that you've never heard of who are building a creepy stalker profile of who you are and what advertising will be most effective on you – actually have any kind of political import or relevance to the world at all.
Just to be clear: I'm sure someone reading this will say "but the people who are in power are right-wing fascists/capitalists/whatever", or maybe that it's actually the ZOG communist Democrat tranny globohomo shadow government controlling everything as the right is also fond of saying. No, they're not; neither left nor right has any real political power as far as genuinely held beliefs and agendas goes. If you think that the people in power believe in anything whatsoever and that they don't just use politics as a flesh skin mask to make themselves look like real people and not parasitic husks who only care about acquiring as many resources for themselves as possible, then I'm afraid you've been duped like the rest of the idiot masses. A tapeworm doesn't believe in anything, it operates purely on the most basest of instincts to survive and procreate, and the rich and powerful are just a very high-level form of that. Most of them have simply managed to game the system and trick people into thinking that they stand for something or are contributing something to the world. People in government – even people with apparently very extreme views – convincing the people who get them into power that they actually believe the shit they're saying so that they can push more bills through that will benefit the people who paid for their political campaigns and eventually get a comfy high-level job in the private sector or continue to be career politicians getting paid off by corporate lobbyists, the bourgeois who use invoke the ideology of capital that they're innovators who are rich because they were the most fit for survival in the free market and not simply the beneficiaries of a rigged system in which the state artifically props up certain corporations and industries. In the words of k-punk, who said it better than me:
The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief. It is impossible to conceive of fascism or Stalinism without propaganda - but capitalism can proceed perfectly well, indeed better, without anyone making a case for it.
- k-punk, "Robot Historian in the Ruins"
I'm afraid your human-all-too-human impulse to find meaning is simply not applicable to the world we live in. Apparently hardly anyone, even people who are supposedly in the circles of accelerationism even if they are against it, ever learned anything from Unconditional Accelerationism, which was only ever meant to be a mode of analyzing capital in precisely the way Mark Fisher describes it. And this isn't some extremely heretical or weird way of looking at it, either; it's a pretty standard orthodox Marxist view of capital as an impersonal system rather than something that is being controlled and perpetrated by certain bad individuals. But I'm giving the people I'm addressing too much credit, since no one who larps online as having any kind of politics actually reads or understands anything a single sentence beyond whatever is necessary to play pretend with the other powerless serfs waiting to die.
To be honest, it actually sickens me a little bit thinking back to 2016 when a bunch of people were "radicalized" by Trump getting elected. I used to have some slight amount of optimism that surely by sheer numbers there would be some people who would come out of this new wave of "radicalization" who would be more than just larpers and radlibs, but it's only become more apparent to me over time that this human tendency to think in terms of individual agency and there being some meaning or purpose to things that happen has worked insidiously alongside algorithmic engagement-driven social media and the utter hopelessness of the situation the world is in to enable people to find other people who are above-average enough in intelligence to recognize that the world is fucked, but either not smart enough or not brave enough to be willing to question their own beliefs and why it is that everything has definitively failed.
To reference Mark Fisher again, it seems like all this has done is create the foundations upon which vampire castles could be built. Instead of doing literally anything of substance, anything at all that actually has some kind of positive material affect on the world even if it won't result in that big climatic overthrowing of capitalism, our monkey brains sought out the path of least resistance of creating these pointless political spectacles on the internet where we can act out having struggle sessions and defeating some big bad. The so-called radicals feel like they've done their daily due diligence of fighting evil, the ad companies masquerading as tech companies are happy since they got more engagement and were able to mine more data; everyone is happy. As trite as this comparison is, it feels like seeing everyone trapped in the Matrix, pointlessly fighting simulacra of important political struggles (which let's face it pretty much only ever turn into moral purity tests without anything whatsoever that breaks so distinctly from the existent in a way where it could then earn the label of being "radical").
I can think of no better example of these tendencies, much as I don't want to make it all about me, of people on the internet who spend way too much time trying to fight the evils of accelerationism or specifically G/ACC. Treating accelerationism – something confined pretty much entirely to the internet and academia which actively rejects the idea of there needing to be some kind of clearly defined praxis – as some serious important threat that needs to be stopped is the peak of this cowed pseudo-radical larping. But the only thing stupider than that is thinking that G/ACC specifically matters. For the left leaning people at least, it should be pretty fucking obvious that as a tranny (and a poor and precarious one at that who was basically homeless for awhile last year!), I don't really have any kind of hegemonic power in the world. Yes, I may be white, but for most trannies what that mostly manifests as is the difference between being villified and rejected by society and then adding on top of that probably being murdered. Unless you are one of the lucky few who has a job working as a defense contractor (which apparently there are a lot of queers working in defense for some reason?), or working in a real tech job that pays a lot of money, or if you're at least straight and passing and consequently able to be accepted by white cishet liberals who will treat you as a fashion accessory or sex toy, I would say that generally being a trans woman outright denies you any ability to ever acquire any form of hegemonic power. And this is all ignoring that G/ACC is basically a fringe within a fringe; the only further you can go into weird fringey shit within the sphere of accelerationism is by being really into the numogram and time sorcery.
So yeah, tl;dr go outside, touch sex, have grass, try to do something that has some kind of material benefit to yourself and the world. I'm not saying you need to be doing something, anything, to fight whatever you think the big bad is, even if you think self-flagellating to stop the plague is at least "doing something", but there are ways that you can live more radically. You can work with people to build alternative infrastructures, networks of mutual aid or community defense, teach people skills like first aid or how to shoot a gun, disseminate information about DIY birth control or how to homebrew hormones or how to shoplift. If you haven't noticed, the world is pretty shitty, so fortunately for you the bar is set extremely low. Just please do literally anything other than continue to larp online and pretend like you're radical or are doing anything of substance. All you're really managing to accomplish is annoying me enough into writing this shit.