Daily Dialectic

Almost 30 years after Donna Haraway first published “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985), Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek uploaded “#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics” (2013). Both programmes represent a call to technological arms—a future-oriented optimism driven by an awareness of our essential artificiality. The “illegitimate offspring” of capitalist hegemony, cyborgs and accelerationists identify as inorganic, engineered—neither innocent nor revolutionary. According to Haraway, as well as Williams and Srnicek, appeals to “nature,” “authenticity,” and “original unity” are symptoms of an impotent left caught in a web of essentialism and neo-primitivist localism. Through dispensing with such appeals, we can focus upon “regenerating,” and “re-engineering” our possibilities.

The dialectic will explore the relationship between these two notoriously difficult texts. What motivates this exploration is the inability for either rationalist humanism or postmodernism to redefine the relationship between technology, humanity, and the future. Through bringing Accelerationism into contact with the Cyborg, I aim to show how these “mutants”—of rationalism and postmodernism respectively—might hold the key to reconfiguring our future.