Motus Mentis

What we used to call the “reactosphere” has added some fine younger contributors over the last few years. One of the best is Auron Macintyre, who does podcasts (both on his own and with guests), YouTube videos, and a column at Substack (you can also follow him on X). I give him my highest recommendation: he reads broadly, understands what he reads, and everything he puts out offers clarification, useful synthesis, and good common sense. (He also seems to be a likeable fellow.) In a recent video (you can watch it here), he discusses the idea of accelerationism, as described in Nick Land’s 2017 essay A Quick-And-Dirty Introduction To Accelerationism.

In Land’s essay, the focus is not on whether we should ourselves be accelerationists (MacIntyre, like me, has concluded that we oughtn’t), but on a key feature of the process itself: namely, that as the rate of change increases, and things happen faster and faster, while the time it takes for us to think about them, especially in distributed political systems, remains constant, the result is that our “decision space” effectively “implodes”.

Land connects this “implosion” to the “explosion of the world”:

Accelerationism links the implosion of decision-space to the explosion of the world – that is, to modernity. It is important therefore to note that the conceptual opposition between implosion and explosion does nothing to impede their real (mechanical) coupling. Thermonuclear weapons provide the most vividly illuminating examples. An H-bomb employs an A-bomb as a trigger. A fission reaction sparks a fusion reaction. The fusion mass is crushed into ignition by a blast process. (Modernity is a blast.)

I’ve been commenting on this for more than a decade now, with the difference that I characterize what Land calls “the explosion of the world” as an implosion as well: namely, that the exponentially accelerating interconnection of everything with everything else has had the effect of making the world drastically, and very rapidly, smaller, in a way that can be modeled with surprisingly deep metaphorical accuracy by the compression of a gas inside a piston. I wrote about this first in these pages in 2013, and then published a condensed version at American Greatness in 2020.

Here was how I described, in 2013, the “implosion” of “decision space”:

In short, the smaller and hotter the world is — in other words, the more likely it becomes that any two “particles” will impinge on each other in a given time — the more volatile, reactive, unstable, and “twitchy” it becomes. As volatility and the rate of change increase, it becomes more and more difficult for systems and institutions that operate at a constant pace — the legislative processes of large democracies, for example — to respond effectively to innovations and crises.

At the same time, however, the shrinking distance between any two points in the world-network makes it possible for governments to monitor people and events, and to exert sovereign power, with an immediacy and granularity that is without historical precedent. This creates a powerful centralizing influence: the more a government can see, the more it will want to control, and an accelerating trend toward consolidation of government power at the expense of local control is evident everywhere in the developed world. The result is that modern democratic governments are able to supervise their subjects far more closely, and extend their power over them far more directly and individually, than even the most autocratic despot could have managed a hundred years ago. Our smaller world may well provide increasingly fertile ground for technological tyrannies of the sort foreseen by Orwell (although ubiquitous access to communication networks may also make it easier to organize an effective resistance).

… We now see governments expanding and centralizing, due to the exponentially increasing coverage and immediacy of all forms of monitoring and communication. As this happens, the scale and scope of government, and the depth and breadth of the administrative and legislative tasks that government must perform, increase rapidly as well. But the capacity of a finite number of human legislators, administrators, and civil servants to operate this expanding hierarchical apparatus, across all its parts in real time, does not “scale up” at the same rate, and so the ability of these increasingly vast hierarchies to respond flexibly and effectively to accelerating change falls farther and farther behind.

Something, sooner or later, has to give. What might happen?

I went on to describe various possibilities: collapse, disaggregation, and “Butlerian Jihad”. One that I did not dwell on, but which is far from implausible, is sharply tightening totalitarian control (although that might not be so easy to engineer, and might still not solve the problem of collapsing decision space).

That was eleven years ago, and we can see, by now, that the problem is only worsening (and may get very much worse indeed, very soon). But for those of you who haven’t really thought much about this, I recommend you put on some headphones, go outside for a walk, and have a listen to Mr. Macintyre’s excellent overview, here.