Grey Hat Accelerationism (GHX) — A Primer — Part 1

Looking to the future through the past

One of the first topics of 2021 is a primer on the subject of Grey Hat Accelerationism (GHX) published across several posts.

In this series, we break down some of the core concepts/influences of GHX into bite size chunks with links to source material. Some of the terminology at first might seem familiar, but often derives from sources that have re-used a term in a specific way, Bratton’s use of the word “stack” being an obvious one.

Each section can be read on its own and provides a synopsis of a concept or influence, and includes links and references for further reading.

Origins

Accelerationism didn’t gain its name until Benjamin Noys assigned it such. However, the concept as documented in multiple articles in Bleeding into Reality pre-dates Noys. One of the main influences on the GHX concept has been the CCRU (Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit).

While Nick Land has come to somewhat dominate the topic, mining the work of the 1990s shows an incredibly rich vein of thought and experimentation by the other CCRU members. It was from this that the hyperstitional GHX has drawn multiple influences. These early progenitors being heavily involved in mixing music, science fiction literature, early internet culture, and philosophy together to provide something unique to its time period.

Starting with reading some of the texts associated with the CCRU is a good entry point, and there are now numerous articles, books and blogs on accelerationism.

We’ve provided a few examples below and following this will begin to look at the influences on both accelerationism’s authors and GHX itself, starting with the 1990s.

Further reading:

1. Ccru writings 1997–2003 — available from Urbanomic here.
2. #Accelerate — Accerlationist reader — also available from Urbanomic here.
3. Nick Land — Fanged Noumena — another Urbanomic title available in paperback here.
4. Reza Negarestani — Cyclonopedia — available from re.press
5. Simon Reynolds — Simon’s Interview with CCRU (1998) — Mark Fisher’s blog (K-punk)
6. Sadie Plant — Zeros + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture — Available in paperback from Amazon and other bookstores.
7. Synthetic Zero — ‘THE ONLY THING I WOULD IMPOSE IS FRAGMENTATION’ — AN INTERVIEW WITH NICK LAND — https://syntheticzero.net/2017/06/19/the-only-thing-i-would-impose-is-fragmentation-an-interview-with-nick-land/
8. Nick Land — Meltdown — http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm

Nineties and the birth of the web

Without a doubt you wouldn’t be reading this article without the birth of the web in the early 90s. It was from this time period that the modern current we call acclerationism was born. Wired magazine, Mondo 2000 and similar cultural publications bootstrapped the emerging technology with a cultural underground.

From this bubbling soup of ideas and possibilities cyber-culture emerged as globalization was hitting the gas pedal. The CCRU writing is very much a product of its era and shot through with references to Y2K and other 90s cyber-zeistgeistry.

This has undoubtedly had an influence on GHX, through its inheritance of early accelerationist influences.

Further reading:

1. Erik Davis — TechGnosis — https://techgnosis.com/. Davis’ books can also be purchased form his site here.
2. Mondo 2000 — Available on Archive.org under MONDO 2000
3. Early Wired magazine — Available on the Wired site example: William Gibson — Disneyland with the Death Penalty
4. Y2K — Time Magazine has an interesting retrospective at: Remember Y2K? Here’s How We Prepped for the Non-Disaster

Situationism

A common vein in GHX works is the nod to Situationism. This has at least some of its origin in the work of Sadie Plant. As many know Plant was one of the core members of the CCRU, but perhaps what is less common knowledge is that she was an expert on the subject of Situationism and the Situation International.

In ’92 Plant published the book The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age:

This book is the first major study of the Situationist International. Tracing the history, ideas and influences of this radical and inspiring movement from dada to postmodernism, it argues that situationist ideas of art, revolution, everyday life and the spectacle continue to inform a variety of the most urgent political events, cultural movements, and theoretical debates of our times.

You may have read Zeros + Ones but if you can find this text too and are interested in Plant’s writing then this is an additional text to add to your list.

For those not overly familiar with the term, Situationism was the philosophy attributed to French left-bank thinker Guy Debord, author of the Society of the Spectacle. The main tenets of Situationism can be summed up as:

1. The Spectacle, which heavily manifests itself in mass media and societies reaction to it
2. Détournement, a method for turning expressions of the capitalist system against itself
3. Anti-capitalism, the term being self explanatory
4. An approach that art and politics can not be separated from one another
5. The creation of situations, defined by the Situationist International as “a moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a game of events.”
6. A study and application of Psychogeography and the dérive (more on this later)

These Situationist ideas can also be found throughout other areas of accelerationist and parallel thought, and have heavily manifested themselves in orbital bodies such as the Sorcery of the Spectacle subreddit over the years.

As you will see throughout the rest of this series of articles Situationism has had a subtle and in some cases not so subtle impact on many sources of inspiration for GHX, such as psychogeography and even Cyberpunk. References can be found littered in Cyberpunk texts and their authors non-fiction counterparts. Gibson in his book distrust that particular flavor (a collection of non-fiction essays and articles) wryly comments that the French situationists knew nothing of the spectacle without having visited Shinjuku. He also noted, Japan is Cyberpunk.

A final observation to note however is that, the Situationist influence has not manifested in an explicitly Left wing praxis or train of thought, which was certainly its origin. It’s increasingly become post-political, like accelerationism in its unconditional form and has been absorbed into capitalism.

Further reading:

1. Guy Debord — The Society of the Spectacle — you can find links to libraries and locations to buy it at goodreads.com or find it here at libcom in PDF format.
2. Debord/Jorn/Vaneigem/Knabb — Situationist International Anthology- available from AK Press here.
3. Morgan/Purje — An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle — https://hyperallergic.com/313435/an-illustrated-guide-to-guy-debords-the-society-of-the-spectacle/
4. Sadie Plant — The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age — available on Amazon.com
5. William Gibson — Distrust That Particular Flavor — checkout goodreads for links to purchase and libraries
6. Reddit — Sorcery of the Spectacle (especially earlier material)

‘Pataphysics, OULIPO, Burroughs and Algorithmic Writing

An influence on Situationists, CCRU and GHX has been been William Burroughs, the OULIPO (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) and the algorithmic writing styles these groups and individuals championed.

Burroughs is best known for his cut-up writing style and influenced Nick Land and the CCRU’s work aS documented in Ccru Writings — 1997–2003 (also see: Dr. Rinaldi’s Horror Cabinet blog post Nick Land: Time-Travel, Akashic Records, and Templexity as well).

The OULIPO, an off-shoot of the Alfred Jarry inspired College of ‘Pataphysics, which in-turn influenced the Situationists and in parallel the the Priory of Sion/Rennes-Le-Chateau Augmented Reality Game (see: The ARG as a new model for Rennes-le-Château phenomenon) has also had a discernible influence on GHX.

Namely through algorithmic writing techniques which have found new homes in AI/ML programs, and the hyperstitional toolkit that the Rennes mystery demonstrated was re-useable (more on ARGs shortly).

For Burroughs’ work Naked Lunch and the Revised Boy Scout Manual provide a good introduction to his cut-up writing style and approach to life. Burroughs had an impact on the writing of the CCRU (see: Lemurian Time War) and has often been grouped with Jarry, as The Wire’s Psychic Jam’s article notes:

This anti-tradition includes a string of iconoclasts (like Alexander Trocchi, William S Burroughs, the surrealists, the dadaists and Alfred Jarry) who wanted to expand the limits of freedom by exploring and expanding the human mind. This was seen as a first step towards a revolution in the head that would — by creating a new type of wo/man — result in a total overthrow of society.

For the other French inspired texts, starting with Alfred Jarry’s work, then the material on the OULIPO, followed by de Sèdes and de Chérisey’s, Henry Lincoln’s then circling back to the pataphysical texts provides an interesting walk through this strange tube line of history.

Finally the work of Derek Hales merges that of Land, and Plant’s with the world of ‘Pataphysics, tying everything back together in a loop joining the past and present.

This section really deserves several articles of its own to make sense of the material, however if you wish to dip your toes into the water, these texts provide a good selection.

Further reading:

1. Alfred Jarry — Ubu Roi — available in paper back here.
2. Alfred Jarry — Exploits & Opinions of Docteur Faustroll, Pataphysician: A Neo-Scientific Novel — check out the goodreads site.
3. Alistair Brotchie — Alfred Jarry — A Pataphysical Life — MIT Press.
4. Andrew Hugill — ‘Pataphysics a useless guide — MIT Press. Also check out Andrew Hugill’s website here.
5. ‘Pataphysics — The Poetics of an Imaginary Science — available from Amazon.
6. poets.org — A Brief Guide to OULIPO — https://poets.org/text/brief-guide-oulipo
7. Andrew Gallix — Oulipo: freeing literature by tightening its rules — https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/jul/12/oulipo-freeing-literature-tightening-rules
8. OULIPO — https://www.oulipo.net/
9. Henry Lincoln — The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail — available on amazon.com
10. Gérard de Sède — L’Or de Rennes — look for this in online second hand book stores
11. Gérard de Sède — Le tresor maudit de Rennes-le-Château — look for this in online second hand book stores
12. Philippe de Chérisey — Circuit — look to goodreads for links to this.
13. The Wire — Psychic James — https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/p=32303
14. William Burroughs — The Revised Boy Scout Manual: An Electronic Revolution — available from a variety of source including Ohio State University Press
15. William Burroughs — Naked Lunch — available from Amazon.com
16. CCRU — Lemurian Time War — http://www.ccru.net/archive/burroughs.htm
17. Dr. Rinaldi’s Horror Cabinet — Nick Land: Time-Travel, Akashic Records, and Templexity
18. Derek Hales — Assimilating the Deleuzian Objectile to a Pataphysical Clinamen: A pataphysical objectile for design research — https://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/4222/1/Hales_submitted_print_October07_2019.pdf

Psychogeography

From the work of Debord and the Situationists came the field of psychogeography. In short this can be described as the effect buildings, geographical nodes and the urban environment have upon its inhabitants. Accelerationism (and Cyberpunk) are inherently urban phenomena. Thus psychogeography, while not limited to urban environments, is heavily associated with them. From Iain Sinclair’s writings on London to Will Self’s similar urban orientated texts the two have become heavily intertwined.

Key concepts to understand from this field include Guy Debord’s dérive, which is a mode of behavior associated with experimental passages through urban environments. One such example would be using a map of London to navigate New York. Another is the flâneur, coming from the French to stroll (flânerie) and popularized as the urban artist-poet in the works of Charles Baudelaire.

Further reading:

1. Charles Baudelaire — The Painter of Modern Life — available from UPenn in PDF format here.
2. Iain Sinclair — Dining on Stones — check out goodreads.
3. Iain Sinclair — Lud Heat — also available via goodreads.
4. Will Self — Psychogeography — https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/psychogeography-9780747590330/
5. Guy Debord — Psychogeographic guide of Paris — https://imaginarymuseum.org/LPG/Mapsitu1.htm
6. Bradley Garrett (Guardian.com) — Underground London: adventures in the secret city beneath out feet
7. Portals of London — Under river, outside time: The Woolwich Foot Tunnel Anomaly

Augmented Reality Games

Discussions around Augmented Reality Games (ARGs) has been prominent in the news recently due to the Q Anon conspiracy theorists. However as a component of the post-modern world we find ourselves in, they have been around for far longer than the antics of whoever conjured up the Q egregor.

The Rennes-le-Château mystery is perhaps the greatest example of an ARG from the mid 20th through early 21st Century, for further information on this check out the links to the work of Mariano Tomatis. Musicians have also gotten in on the game. Industrial outfit Nine Inch Nails (NIN) fronted by the multi-talented Trent Reznor released their album Year Zero in 2007 complete with an ARG.

Rumor also has it that David Bowie had concocted some form of ARG that has come to play out posthumously, as documented on the Facing the Stranger blog.

And how can anyone forget the Cicada 3301 puzzles, which may have some tentative link to Q Anon? Some have even claimed that a group, much like the CCRU but tied to the Cypherpunk community may have been involved.

Author Jack Heart touches upon and weaves together topics as diverse as the CCRU, Timothy Leary, Cicada 3301 and H.P Lovecraft on his podcast, and in his The Tek-Gnostics Heresies: Tales of Wonder from the Collective Conscious books.

As our world gets ever weirder and the pace of technological change accelerates, ARGs become more prominent and spawn their own bizarre chaos effects. Understanding this, can help to understand some of the forces at play.

Further reading:

1. Mariano Tomatis — The ARG as a new model for Rennes-le-Château phenomenon
2. Mariano Tomatis — The infinite game of Rennes-le-Château
3. Rolling Stone — Zero’s Heroes: Nine Inch Nails Get Cryptic — https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/zeros-heroes-nine-inch-nails-get-cryptic-56414/
4. Samizdat — Cicada Files: Prelude — https://therealsamizdat.com/
5. Samizdat — Cicada Files: Z 3301 et al (article on QAnon link to Cicada 3301) — https://therealsamizdat.com/2019/09/12/cicada-files-schoenberger-1/
6. Uncovering Cicada Wiki — Does Cicada 3301 originate from UC Berkeley group (cicada.berkeley.edu) in 90s? — https://uncovering-cicada.fandom.com/wiki/Does_Cicada_3301_originate_from_UC_Berkeley_group_(cicada.berkeley.edu)_in_90s%3F
7. Facing the Stranger — Three years ago, I found a secret version of Blackstar and my life got weird.
8. The Tek-Gnostics | The Farm | Steven Snider with Jack Heart — Tek-Gnostics, counterculture, Timothy Leary, eight circuit model, New Age Dark Enlightenment, Nick Land, Lovecraft, CCRU, Rudolf Steiner, Sandoz, LSD, ESP, ergot, Stanford, SRI, Human Augmentation

Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard

Marshall McLuhan’s was arguably the 20th Centuries greatest theorist on Media. His text The Medium is the Massage (the strange title having come about due to a misprint) being perhaps his most well known.

McLuhan’s work has undoubtedly had an effect on accelerationism and the current of thought that typically flows through Reddit’s Sorcery of the Spectacle and the pages of Mondo 2000. You’ll find references to McLuhan sprinkled through texts such as those on ccru.net website, an example being Rohit Lekhi’s Futureloop / Black Bedlam:

Cut to 1964: McLuhan envisages a total prosthetics — ‘an electronic skin’ engendering macrocosmic Man. The modernist fantasy of machinic domination is re-enforced — the fascistic fantasy of transcendence.

A fellow traveler in exploring our strange media saturated environment is sociologist, philosopher and cultural theorist, Jean Baudrillard. His text Simulacra and Simulation examines the relationships between reality and symbols. Positing such ideas as:

1. Simulacra: copies that depict things that never had an original, or where original no longer exists
2. Simulation: the imitation of the operation of a real world system or process

Baudrillard came to describe the world around us that the Internet and the Spectacle has created, a hyperreal environment.

If you want to try to understand this society we find ourselves in, then reading McLuhan’s work alongside Jean Baudrillard’s is a must.

Further reading:

1. Andrew McLuhan — What is a Tetrad
2. Mondo 2000 — Marshall McLuhan: The Cognitive Agent as Cyberpunk Godfather
3. Marshall McLuhan — The Medium is the Message — https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/mcluhan.mediummessage.pdf
4. Marshall McLuhan — The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century (Communication and Society) — available from Amazon.com
5. Rohit Lekhi — Futureloop / Black Bedlam — http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_futureloop.htm
6. Jean Baudrillard — Simulacra and Simulation — https://www.press.umich.edu/9900/simulacra_and_simulation

The Stack

Another oft-referenced body of work is Benjamin Bratton's The Stack. Bratton is a professor at UCSD who borrowed the concept of the TCP/IP stack in order to describe how software (and the technology that accompanies it) is impacting traditional models of sovereignty.

The basic premise of his work is that we can divide up our current technology enhanced world into layers, and each layer contains a set of technologies that define how we live and the planet’s governance models.

Bratton’s influence found its way into accelerationist circles with the book #Accelerate and the piece Red Stack Attack! Algorithms, Capital and the Automation of the Common.

His most recent work The Terraforming (you can read more at the interview between himself and Palladium Magazine where the ideas from this book are discussed) builds upon these ideas and the challenges humanity faces as it looks for solutions to climate change.

Further reading:

1. Benjamin H. Bratton — The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty — https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/stack
2. #Accelerate — the accelerationist reader: Red Stack Attack! Algorithms, Capital and the Automation of the Common. https://www.urbanomic.com/chapter/accelerate-tiziana-terranova-red-stack-attack/
3. Palladium Magazine — Benjamin H. Bratton on Terraforming the World Order — https://palladiummag.com/2021/01/11/benjamin-h-bratton-on-terraforming-the-world-order/
4. Benjamin H. Bratton — The Terraforming — https://www.amazon.com/Terraforming-Benjamin-Bratton-ebook/dp/B07Y7HD3GR

Hackers Manifesto(s)

Accelerationism is at its heart also an informational phenomena. The accelerationist world is built upon layers of hardware and code, that transfer bits of data at lightspeed across the Oceans, and over radio waves to our laptops. This technology has always had an underworld. The disrupters who poke and probe at the systems, who challenge the norm, who challenge the Westphalian system of sovereignty, that system that Benjamin H. Bratton notes is being transmogrified by our planetary technological superstructure.

From Hacker’s and Cypherpunk manifestos, to 2600 magazine and Phrack boundaries are challenged and vulnerabilities exploited. In the 2000s this manifests with blockchain and Bitcoin, it’s tentacles having crept back into the past and influenced the writings of Eric Hughes, Tim May and similar crypto-anarchists and Cypherpunks.

Tim May, writer of the Crypto Anarchist manifesto of course comes up in interviews with Nick Land (and likely had some influence on the CCRU), as the following interview with Justin Murphy, transcribed onto the Vast Abrupt website demonstrates:

And I would obviously say these blockchain technologies, I mean, they were envisaged in some sort of extremely abstract philosophical sense in the 1990s, everyone thought (who was looking at these issues at all), everyone could see that what the internet was going to do was produce these distributed structures that escaped the kind of established structures of governance that would be, in some insurrectionary sense, apolitical. You look back at some of these early cypherpunk and crypto-anarchist writings — Tim May, people like that — and they catch a hell of a lot of this stuff and what it’s going to do, and what it’s going to mean, and people were seeing that in the late 1990s and then they lost it … the internet just looked like an extremely sad opportunity for this narcissistic implosion back into the most pathetic forms of subjectivity.

Delving into the Hacker and Cypherpunk texts of the 80’s and 90’s and those magazines who are still going today, as well as the the bitcoin white-paper by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, can help to form an understanding of how we got from the early genesis of crypto-anarchy in 1988, to the world of Block Chain in 2008 and finally to Nick Land’s championing of crypto currencies in 2018.

Further reading:

1. 2600 Magazine (1984 onwards) — website, current back issues available online at https://www.2600.com/
2. Phrack Magazine (1985) — Volume One, Issue One, Phile 1 of 8 — http://www.phrack.org/issues/1/1.html
3. The Mentor (published on Phrack Magazine) — The Hacker Manifesto — http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html
4. Tim May (1988) — The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto — https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html
5. Eric Hughes (1993) — The Cypherpunk Manifesto — https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html
6. Satoshi Nakamoto (2008) — Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System — https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
7. Vast Abrupt/Justin Murphy (2018) — Ideology, Intelligence, and Capital: An Interview with Nick Land — https://vastabrupt.com/2018/08/15/ideology-intelligence-and-capital-nick-land/

Part 1 Conclusion

This initial post has covered a variety of topics from the writings to Benjamin Bratton, to the writings of Alfred Jarry. It is by no means exhaustive, but following the rabbit hole for any one of these sections will lead you into the rhizome of books, websites, podcasts, whitepapers and magazines, that link all these topics together and form the world GHX hopes to understand and navigate, understanding that as accelerationism is the critique, it cannot control it.

In the next post we will look at fragmentation, exit, Leopold Kohr , Cyberpunk and variety of other influences.