The Concept of Acceleration (Session 5)

Provenance

Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: stage-1 acceptance ruling — lane open-web-talk approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  Hello and welcome to the fifth session of the concept of acceleration. I'm going to pass the mic off to Nick Land right now. Thanks Theo and thanks everyone for being here. So as I was just saying to people, I think that I'm thinking of this as being the first of a two-week block on the trough phase of our current…

• 00:20:30

  Today's advocates of space jets, lunar vacations, and the manned exploration of the solar system appear to hail from another planet. Now there's lots of things that could be said about this paragraph. My interest in it particularly is how it really locks onto the MAP, which actually is written two years later, in this…

• 00:51:01

  But my point, I guess, is that if you bracket away the ideological background, then what you're left with is a praxis that looks very much like some kind of state-led development process. And of course, you're right that it's not left-wing. But then in a sense, this is a problem that left accelerationism has to deal…

• 01:12:09

  Like, definitely, that's one of the biggest of the technologies that had the biggest economic potential coming out of them that were clearly wartime developments. That would be one of them. And ever since Three Mile Island, that hasn't been happening at all. What was I going to say? But I mean…

• 01:33:42

  Right. Sure. Yeah. I mean, do you think it's fair to summarize that as just saying that Luddism was essentially tactical? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know what James's comment here fits in. I mean, I just can't even make sense. I mean, I don't know whether anyone else can. James got this thing that says…

• 01:54:36

  And then, thus, I assume, displacing some significant chunk of what was there before. I'm much less clear what the... what this more straightforwardly left accelerationist solution is to that problem. Isn't this the same sort of problem of trying to measure the alleged stagnation in the first place? Because, I mean…

• 02:14:47

  He's got a lot of negative opinions about what's going on in all these special economic zones. He's reasserted the need for state leadership of the economy. So I think you're probably right that the very size of China and its kind of contradictory traditions are going to be a problem in this sense. Yeah, yeah…

• 02:38:24

  I'm not sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sounds good to me. Sounds good to me. Yeah, we're about 20 minutes over now. Is there, does anyone have a point that they're going to just bust a blood vessel if they don't make now? Okay, I'm going to take that as compliance then. Thanks, everybody. And thanks to you, as well…